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METAPHYSICS; 



OR, THE 



SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION 



JOHN MILLER, 

Princeton, N. J. 




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.NEW YORK : 

DODD & MEAD, PUBLISHERS, 

751 BROADWAY. 






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THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 

DODD & MEAD, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



■/T 



7 



TO THE MEMORY 



M .Y FATHER 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION . . . . ; 17 

BOOK I. 

PSYCHOLOGY; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION 
AS SUCH. 

CHAPTER I. 
The Conscious Current 21 

CHAPTER II. 
A Certain Phenomenon of the Conscious Current 21 

CHAPTER III. 
A Name for that Certain Phenomenon 23 

CHAPTER IV. 

Perception the Only Phenomenon of the Conscious Current 25 

CHAPTER V. 
Three Aspects of Perception 27 

CHAPTER VI. 
Consciousness 27 

CHAPTER VII. 
All Consciousness Perception 29 



vi Contents. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

I'AGS 

All Perception Consciousness 30 

CHAPTER IX. 
Emotion 32 

CHAPTER X. 
All Emotion Perception 33 

CHAPTER XI. 
All Perception Emotion 35 

CHAPTER XII. 
Cognition 36 

CHAPTER XIII. 
All Cognition Perception 37 

CHAPTER XIV. 
All Perception Cognition 38 

CHAPTER XV. 
No Simple Perceptions 39 

CHAPTER XVI. 
Words 39 

CHAPTER XVII. 
Definition 40 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
The Laws of Perception 1 42 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Law I :— Perception as Incessant 43 



Contents. vii 

CHAPTER XX. 

PAGE 

Perception as Transient 44 

CHAPTER XXI. 
Perception as Limited 44 

CHAPTER XXII. 
Perception as a Conscious Current 46 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
Perceptions as Associated in Order 46 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
The Laws of Association , 48 

CHAPTER XXV. 
Law II : — Law of the Strongest Emotion 50 

CHAPTER XXVI. 
Law III : — Perception as Fading 52 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

The Law of the Strongest Emotion the Only Law of 
Mental Association 54 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 
Kant's Three Great Classes of the Phenomena of the Mind 54 

CHAPTER XXIX. 
Volition 58 

CHAPTER XXX. 
Volition has but Two Provinces 59 



viii Contents. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

PAGE 

Law IV : — Perception as it Affects the Body in its Ner- 
vous, Muscular, and Sanguineous Systems 59 

CHAPTER XXXII. 
Muscular Volition 62 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 
Attention 69 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

Attention the Only Province of Volition not Muscular . . 69 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

Will, in its Second Province, no Separate Act at all ; 
Attention Entirely Accounted' for by the Law of 
the Strongest Emotion 71 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 
All Volition Perception 73 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 
Law V : — Perception as Recurring. 75 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
Law VI : — Perception as Continuous 76 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 
Memory 78 

CHAPTER XL. 
Recollection 81 

CHAPTER XLI. 
Imagination. 82 



Contents. ix 

CHAPTER XLII. 

PAGE 

Analysis 82 

CHAPTER XLIII. 
Abstraction 83 

CHAPTER XLIV. 
Judgment, Comparison, Deduction, Reason 83 



*>*■<■ 



BOOK II. 

LOGIC ; OR, THE* SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS 
KNOWLEDGE. 

CHAPTER I. 
Knowledge 85 

CHAPTER II. 
Conscious Knowledge 86 

CHAPTER III. 
Intuitive Knowledge 86 

CHAPTER IV. 
Ground of Intuitive Knowledge 88 

CHAPTER V. 
Degree of Intuitive Knowledge 89 

CHAPTER VI. 
Extent of Intuitive Knowledge 8q 



x Contents. 

CHAPTER VII. 

PAGE 

Influence on Intuitive Knowledge of the Laws of Percep- 
tion 90 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Empirical Knowledge 92 

CHAPTER IX. 
Ground of Empirical Knowledge 93 

CHAPTER X. 
Three Kinds of Empirical Knowledge 110 

CHAPTER XL 
Degree of Empirical Knowledge 1 114 

CHAPTER XII. 
Extent of Empirical Knowledge 115 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Intuitive Knowledge as Embracing Empirical Knowledge. 115 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Intuitive Knowledge as Distinct from Empirical Knowl- 
edge ,118 

CHAPTER XV. 
Intuitive Beliefs So Called 123 

CHAPTER XVI. 
No such Thing as Intuitive Beliefs So Called 134 

CHAPTER XVII. 

The Doctrine of Intuitive Beliefs not Necessary for 
Purposes of Explanation 145 



Contents. xi 



BOOK III. 

ONTOLOGY; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF BEING. 

CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Ontology under the Light of Psychology 151 

CHAPTER II. 
Ontology under the Light of Logic 152 

CHAPTER III. 
How Could Perception Begin 154 

CHAPTER IV. 

Perception , not in a Current no Cognition of Being 156 

CHAPTER V. 

Perception not in an Orderly Current no Cognition of 
Being 159 

CHAPTER VI. 

Perception in a Current of but One Order not a Cognition 
of Being 160 

CHAPTER VII. 
Two Orders of Perception ....... 161 

CHAPTER VIII. 

One Order Continuous in the Current, and Produced 
Wholly by its Laws 164 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Other Order, in the Current, but not Continuous in 
it, nor Produced Wholly by its Laws 164 



xii Contents. 

CHAPTER X. 

PAGE 

Perception in its Continuous Order, Self till More is 
Added to it 167 

CHAPTER XL 

Perception in an Order not Continuous, the Not-Self till 
More is Added to it 168 

CHAPTER XII. 

The Laws of Perception, Giving Rise to the Continuous 
Order, Give Rise to the Idea of Being 171 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Sensation 172 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Smell 173 

CHAPTER XV. 
Taste 174 

CHAPTER XVI. 
Hearing \ 174 

CHAPTER XVII. 
Sight 176 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
Touch 178 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Sensation as it Contributes to the Idea of Not-Self 179 

CHAPTER XX. 
Sensation as it Contributes to the Idea of Self 181 



Contents. xiii 

CHAPTER XXI. 

PAGE 

Body 181 

CHAPTER XXII. 
Body as it Adds to the Idea of Self 183 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
Body as it Adds to the Idea of Not-Self 183 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
Will, Power, and Cause 187 

CHAPTER XXV. 

Will, Power, and Cause, as they Add to the Idea of the 
Not-Self 192 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

Will, Power, and Cause, as they Add to the Idea of Self. 195 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

The Ideas of Self and Not-Self as they Add to Each 
Other 197 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The Idea of Other Selves as it Adds to the Ideas of Self 

and Not-Self 200 

CHAPTER XXIX. 
Effects of Theology on the Idea of Being 202 

CHAPTER XXX. 
Effects of Science on the Idea of Being 203 

CHAPTER XXXI. 
The Word Being 204 



xiv Contents. 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

PAGE 

The Word Existence 205 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 
The Word Substance 205 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 
Self and Not-Self Highly Complex Ideas 206 

CHAPTER XXXV. 
Effect of Language on the Idea of Being 217 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 
Can we be said to be Conscious of the Not-Self? 219 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 
Can we be said to be Conscious of Self? 220 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
Is Being nothing but Perception ? 221 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 
Is the Idea of the Not-Self Intuitive or Empirical? 224 

CHAPTER XL. 
Is the Idea of Self Intuitive or Empirical? 226 

CHAPTER XLI. 
Are we Certain of Our Own Existence ? 227 

CHAPTER XLII. 
Are we Certain of Anybody Else's Existence? 229 

CHAPTER XLIII. 

Intuitive Beliefs, So Called, under the Light of Ontol- 
ogy 230 



Contents. xv 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

PAGE 

"Perception," in its Modern Sense, a Figment, being but 
an Instance of Intuitive Belief So Called 236 

CHAPTER XLV. 
Sensation as Knowledge. 237 

CHAPTER XLVI. 
Sensation as Knowledge of the Not-Self 239 

CHAPTER XLVII. 
Sensation as Knowledge of Self 240 

CHAPTER XLVIII. 
Is all Perception Sensation ? 242 



» ♦ «• 



BOOK IV. 

PATHICS ; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS 
EMOTION. 

Introductory Chapters. 

CHAPTER I. 
An Attempt to Invent Adequate Names 247 

CHAPTER II. 
Pathics under the Light of Psychology 249 

CHAPTER III. 
Pathics under the Light of Logic 253 

CHAPTER IV. 
Pathics under the Light of Ontology 255 



xvi Contents. 



PART I. 

EUDEMONICS ; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS 
AN EMOTION OF PLEASURE OR OF PAIN. 

CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 
EUDEMONICS IN ITS RELATION TO PATHICS 260 

CHAPTER II. 

EUDEMONICS IN ITS RELATION TO AGATHOLOGY 260 

CHAPTER III. 

EUDEMONICS IN ITS RELATION TO ETHICS 26l 



PART II. 

.ESTHETICS ; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS 
AN EMOTION OF TASTE. 

CHAPTER I. 
Definition 262 

CHAPTER II. 
The Differentia of Beauty 265 

CHAPTER III. 
Esthetics under the Light of Agathology 266 

PART III. 

ETHICS; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS AN 
EMOTION OF CONSCIENCE. 

Introductory Chapters. 

CHAPTER I. 
Emotion at Emotion. 269 



Contents. xvii 

CHAPTER II. 

PAGE 

Emotion as it Widens its Vocabulary 271 

CHAPTER III. 
Emotion as it Leads to Action " 271 

CHAPTER IV. 
Equivocals 272 

DIVISION I. 

THE MORAL QUALITY. 

CHAPTER I. 
Of Moral Science 276 

CHAPTER IT. 
Of the Moral Quality 276 

CHAPTER III. 
Of what Things are Moral 277 

CHAPTER IV. 
What the Moral Quality shall be Called 278 

DIVISION II. 

THE MORAL DUTIES. 

CHAPTER I. 
Of what Things are Moral 280 

CHAPTER II. 
Of Benevolence 280 

CHAPTER III. 
Whether Benevolence is a Virtue 281 



xviii Cojitents. 

CHAPTER IV. 

PAGE 

Whether Benevolence is the only Virtue 283 

CHAPTER V. 
Of a Love to the Moral Quality Itself 284 

CHAPTER VI. 
Proof that there are but Two Virtues 286 

CHAPTER VII. 
Of Love to God 286 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Of Love to Self 287 

CHAPTER IX. 
Why Self-Love has been thought a Virtue 287 

CHAPTER X. 
Of Natural Affection 288 

CHAPTER XI. 
Of the Love of Good Men 290 

CHAPTER XII. 
Of Gratitude 290 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Of Justice 291 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Of Honesty 292 

CHAPTER XV. 
Of Truthfulness 294 



Contents. xix 

CHAPTER XVI. 

PAGE 

Of Chastity 296 

CHAPTER XVII. 
Proof from Scripture 297 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
Whether One of the Two Virtues is Equal to the Other.. 299 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Whether Benevolence is always Equal to Itself 300 

CHAPTER XX. 

Whether the Other Virtue is always Equal to Itself. . 301 

CHAPTER XXI. 
Of What Things are Moral in God 305 

CHAPTER XXII. 
Of God's Love to His Own Happiness 306 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
Of God's Love to His Own Holiness 307 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
Of God's Love to the Holiness of Others 309 

CHAPTER XXV. 
Of God's Love to the Happiness of Others 310 

CHAPTER XXVI. 
Of Sin 311 

CHAPTER XXVII. 
Of the Quality of Sinfulness 312 



xx • Contents. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

PAGE 

Of what Things are Sinful 312 

CHAPTER XXIX. 
Proof that there are but Two Sins 313 

CHAPTER XXX. 
Of Self-Love 314 

CHAPTER XXXI. 
Of Malevolence 315 

CHAPTER XXXII. 
Of Hatred of Virtue 317 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 
Of Enmity to God 318 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 
Of Love to Wickedness 319 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

Of what Things would be Sinful in God 320 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 
Of God's Chief End 320 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 
Of God's Chief End in Creation and Providence 322 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
Of Optimism 323 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 

Of Objections to God's not being Able to Create a Bet- 
ter Universe, Founded upon His Omnipotence 324 



Contents. xxi 

CHAPTER XL 

PAGE 

Of Objections to God's not being Able to Create a Bet- 
ter Universe, Founded upon the Existence of Evil. . 525 

CHAPTER XLI. 
Of Man's Chief End 327 

CHAPTER XLII. 
Of the Practical Consequences of the Foregoing System. . 328 



DIVISION III. 
THE MORAL CHARACTER. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Moral Quality a Quality only of Single Feelings . 329 

CHAPTER II. 
Of Character 330 

CHAPTER III. 
Of Character in its Connection with Cod 331 

CHAPTER IV. 
Of Character in its Connection with Happiness 333 

CHAPTER V. 
Of Rewards 334 

CHAPTER VI. 
Summary of the Preceding 335 

CHAPTER VII. 
Of Covenanted Rewards 338 



xxii Contents. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PACK 

Of Merit 339 

CHAPTER IX. 
Of Punishment 339 

CHAPTER X. 
Of Covenanted Punishment 341 

CHAPTER XI. 
Of Vindicatory Justice 342 

CHAPTER XII. 
Of Guilt 343 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Of Atonement 344 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Of Forgiveness 345 

CHAPTER XV. 
Of Justice 347 

CHAPTER XVI. 
Of Righteousness 349 

CHAPTER XVII. 
Of Desert 350 



Contents. xxiii 



BOOK V. 



THEOLOGY; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS 
KNOWLEDGE OF THE BEING OF A GOD. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Theology under the Light of Psychology 353 



CHAPTER IT. 
Theology under the Light of Logic 354 

CHAPTER III. 
Theology under the Light of Ontology 355 

CHAPTER IV. 
God as Like Other Beings 356 

CHAPTER V. 
God as Unlike Other Beings 358 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Mischievous Effects of Making God Resemble Other 
Beings where He Differs from them 361 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Mischievous Effects of Making God Differ from 
Other Beings where He Resembles Them 364 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Pantheism 368 

CHAPTER IX. 
Polytheism, .... 380 



xxiv Contents. 

CHAPTER X. 

PAGE 

Evolution.. 381 

CHAPTER XI. 
Evolution under the Light of Ethics 383 

CHAPTER XII. 
Evolution under the Light of Revelation 385 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Evolution under the Light of Ontology 397 



METAPHYSICS; 



OR, THE 



SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION 



It is a doctrine of this book that there are no sim- 
ple ideas. It has been a usual doctrine that simple 
ideas cannot be defined. It is the doctrine of this 
book that no ideas can be defined ; that definition is 
a mere approach to a boundary ; and hence the endless 
lists ; no thought ever having attracted much discus- 
sion without great vagrancy in defining it ; that va- 
grancy being greatly increased as thought wanders off 
from the concrete ; abstract thought, and, above all, 
speculative thought, being endlessly at sea, and hard 
to fix by any understood limits. 

Metaphysics, therefore, has been endlessly defined ; 
and, therefore, we will be more pardoned for saying, 
that it has never been defined at all. 

Metaphysics, in fact, is no certain thing ; and in- 
deed, how can it be, till men have adjusted a certain 
Metaphysics ? It may be compared to islands of float- 
ing logs. They have no place ; nor indeed any final 
shape. They are driven by the winds. Name such 
islands, and to-morrow they may be one or ten. It 
would puzzle you to define a horse, and yet there is 



1 8 Metaphysics. 

some fixity about that mammal. But Metaphysics 
has not yet taken shape ; and, therefore, defining it is 
like measuring Prometheus for a coat. As conscious- 
ness becomes more searched, and its shapes more 
settled, Metaphysics will become more fixed ; and then 
different men will be thinking of the same thing ; for 
how possibly can you define an object, if, like sub- 
stance, or like cause, or like atoms, or intuitive belief, 
the men you speak to each treat that object differently, 
and half of them deny the very existence of the thing 
for which you carve the definition ? 

So let us open a door, and, as into the woman's 
department of an insane asylum, plunge into the 
clamor : — 

Aristotle defined Metaphysics as " the art of arts 
and science of sciences " ; Pythagoras, as " the knowl- 
edge of things existent as existent"; Plato, as "the 
greatest music " ; " the Physicians, as " the medicine of 
of souls." Leibnitz defined it as " the science of suffi- 
cient reasons " ; Hobbes, as " the science of effects by 
their causes " ; Descartes, as " the science of things, 
evidently deduced from first principles"; Wolff, as 
" the science of things possible inasmuch as they are 
possible " ; Condillac, as " the science of truths sensi- 
ble and abstract " ; Fichte, as " the science of the 
original form of the ego or mental self" ; Schelling, 
as " the science of the absolute " ; Hegel, as " the 
identity of identity and non-identity ; " and Hamil- 
ton, as " the science of effects as dependent on 
their causes."* 

Babel evidently must date from Peleg : and if men 
must divide their views, and claim the luxury of invent- 

* Hamilton's Lect., pp. 35, 37, 41. 



Introduction. 19 

ing systems, how possibly can there be one definition ? 
The islands must float and form ; and if at length 
some bold promontory arrest the whole of them, mat- 
ters will be different. They will grow to the main 
land of knowledge. They will get the soil and the 
fruit, and even the flowers, of some particular spot ; 
and though, even then, they will not be unchangeably 
defined, they will be settled into one, and take fewer 
speeches to tell their boundary. 

If Perception, for reasons hereafter to be given, is 
the only thing in the conscious current, we should like 
to choose its part of the shore for anchoring Meta- 
physics. We have become persuaded of five apho- 
risms : — First, under Pyschology, — that there is nothing 
consciously in the mind but Perception ; second, under 
Logic, — that there is nothing intuitively known but 
Perception ; third, under Ontology, — that unless being 
is Perception it is not intuitively known ; fourth, under 
Pathics, — that Emotion is numerically the same as 
Perception ; and fifth, under Theology, — that unless 
God is Perception He is not intuitively known. 
These make Perception the total consciousness ; and, 
reserving our account of what Perception is till we 
come to treat it, we will view Metaphysics as the 
" Science of Perception." 

This will be our name, therefore. 

And we will arrange for five Books ; — the First, 
Pyschology, or the Science of Perception As Such ; 
the Second, Logic, or Perception put to use ; not 
statical, as in Psychology, but dynamical, moving for- 
ward into what we call knowledge ; Logic, therefore, 
or the Science of Perception as Knowledge ; third, 
Ontology, or the Science of Perception as the Knowl- 
edge of Being ; fourth, Pathics, or the Science of Per- 



20 Metaphysics. 

ception as Emotion ; and fifth, Theology, or the 
Science of Perception as Knowledge of the Being of a 
God. 

If this exhausts the subject we are right in defining 
Metaphysics as the " Science of Perception." 



BOOK I. 

PSYCHOLOGY; 

OR, THE 

SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS SUCH. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CONSCIOUS CURRENT. 

A CURRENT to which the term conscious belongs, 
is incessantly passing through every mind in its waking 
moments. All that we know of mind, and all that 
we know of matter, and all that we know of anything, 
is comprised in all that may be known of this current. 
If this is not admitted at once, it will be claimed as 
demonstrated in this discussion, the object of which 
will be, by the means of observation as in chemical or 
geological science, to mark all that is, and all that is 
not, consciously present in this diverse, but continual 
current of our consciousness. 

CHAPTER II. 

A CERTAIN PHENOMENON OF THE CONSCIOUS CURRENT. 

LOOKING into the current by aid of consciousness, 
we see one phenomenon, and that an unceasing one. 
It is that which has employed the metaphor of seeing, 
and sometimes of the other senses, to describe it. The 
words, apprehension, cognition, perception, discerning, 



22 Psychology. [Book I. 

and the like, are of course not synonymous, as no 
words are ; but they are all instances of this phenom- 
enon. They all serve immediately to mark it. For 
though they are ambiguous to the last degree, each 
one having at least three meanings ; cognition, for 
example, meaning a mental power, or a mental act, or 
a mental object ; yet, without staying now to discrim- 
inate the list, any or all of them will help us to our 
point, which is, that everywhere in the conscious cur- 
rent there is a phenomenon like that of vision, of 
which vision is itself an instance, which consists in 
beholding, apprehending, perceiving, whatever you 
choose to call it, and which consists in something 
common to all these, and which consists of what the 
mind is aware of when it thinks of itself as standing by 
a window, and seeing interminable objects. They may 
be inward or outward, present or absent, imagined or 
remembered, just as the mind considers or determines 
that they came or were originated, but they all have 
one mark, — that they are sights in some way, or per- 
ceivings, and the train of them is incessant : they never 
slumber, but are ever passing in continuous procession 
before the mind. 

An impatient challenger will say: — Why spoil nice 
distinctions ? A metaphysical system is to be begun 
by taking neat discriminations that the world has 
labored upon, and throwing them all together like 
types out of a case. And my only answer is, that I am 
a positive* philosopher ; that I am an empiricist ; * that 
I begin at the beginning ; that I know nothing about 
sensation at the start, or self or external matter, (I 
mean, logically I do not) ; that I find the types all out 
of the case, and am to sort them by what I see ; and 

* In the better sense of these words. 



Chap. III.] The Name, Perception. 23 

as I have a volume to print of absolute realities, it is 
important for me to know that it is to be eternally 
set up out of these metal pieces and nothing else ; and, 
after I have determined that, I can turn them up, and 
look at the letters, and, if you please, distribute them, 
if only you have once confessed that you have nothing 
else, and that they contain the whole language of our 
possible consciousness. 

CHAPTER III. 

A NAME FOR THAT CERTAIN PHENOMENON. 

The name for the mental seeing of which we have 
been speaking shall be Perception. 

The reasons for this are three: — 

First, that as far as this system shall appear to 
have any truth it will wrest away the word from 
false uses to which moderns have applied it. Sensation 
has been held to mean the conscious phenomena of 
the mind under the direct impressions of sense, and 
Perception those additional phenomena in which the 
mind cognizes by a different power the being and 
relations of external things. 

We deny any such distinction ; and believing, there- 
fore, that Sensation includes all, we keep Perception 
for another use. 

Second, that use is ancient. It is popular; and 
can be found in any dictionary. To frame another 
was a wresting from an understood to an artificial use ; 
as when Sir William Hamilton speaks of our being 
conscious of external matter. Such things rarely pros- 
per. The lines that have been ploughed by the inter- 
course of ages will in the end assert themselves again. 
It is better, if a man wants a term, to frame a new 



24 Psychology. [Book I. 

one. Then, if his discovery holds, it will be kept dis- 
tinct, without the danger of warping back under the 
efforts to get home again of 'an old and differently 
understood expression. 

Thirdly, the term is convenient. Apprehension, 
or cognition, or feeling, or sight, all have more specific 
uses. Idea would have been a good term ; but it has 
no verb to answer to it. Moreover, it has not the three 
senses of Perception which are all convenient. So 
impossible is it always to give notice, that it is conve- 
nient to have a term which the intelligent reader will 
understand himself when it undergoes the change. 
Usage has so triplified all these words for the sake of 
the convenience. And virtue, as first a quality, second 
a feeling, and third a character ; and taste, as first a 
sense, second a flavor, and third a sensation ; and 
truth, as first a truth, second the truth, and third my 
truth, or truthfulness, — are all like the term which we 
have chosen, which we forewarn the reader thus early 
he will have to discriminate when we employ it without 
warning in any of three entirely distinct meanings; as 
for example first, as the power to perceive, second, as 
an act of perceiving, and third, as the object perceived ; 
a shifting not easily misunderstood, and more likely to 
guard the discourse from an improper sense than if a 
different word were invented for each of the changes 
we have thus prefigured. 

Perception, therefore, or having ideas or discern- 
ments of whatever sort, is a grand phenomenon of the 
conscious current. 



Chap. IV.] The Whole Current, Perception. 25 



CHAPTER IV. 

PERCEPTION THE ONLY PHENOMENON OF THE CONSCIOUS CURRENT. 

It is the great task of this treatise to show that 
Perception is the only phenomenon of the conscious 
current. 

To do this we must, of course, appeal to Conscious- 
ness. 

And in doing that we will in this chapter ask the 
more immediate questions of that very near and very 
familiar informant. 

Let the reader, therefore, charge himself with the 
inquiry whether, in the first place, perceptions are ever 
absent from the mental current. Do they not merge 
into each other? Are they not continuous? Is it not 
so, now as I raise the question ? Was it not so always, 
as far as he can trace it in his memory? . If Perception 
is perpetual, then this current exists in the mental 
current ; and if anything else exists, it lies round it, 
or makes another current ; and if that be so, let us 
know distinctly what that other current is. Can we 
conceive of consciousness without that stare of per- 
petual vision, like the Sphinx looking off into the 
desert ? And as one hour is but an epitome of a life- 
time, let a man try to any amount he pleases, and see 
if the stream is not a perpetual stream of ideas, a 
watching of an everlasting procession, a gaze never for 
one moment pretermitted, and having in it wife and 
family and world and time and hope, and whatever 
belongs to this successive and never for one moment 
to be arrested personal experience. 

Now, out of the principle already brought forward 
of respect for language, I do not for one moment doubt 
2 



26 Psychology. [Book I. 

that there is such a thing as Will and Knowledge and 
Emotion, and that these are in the current. I do not 
for one moment blind my mind to the fact that people 
will laugh at such a starting forth upon an argument, 
possessed of a perfect consciousness that they will and 
feel as well as perceive, and that they do so in the cur- 
rent ; nor dare I forget that men will cast off impatiently 
the thought that everybody in a city, for example, or 
on a crowded battle-field, does nothing more mentally 
than perceive, and thereby produce all the changes 
that are concerned in each enterprise of men. 

A fair way, however, of defending such a view is in 
detail. We have chosen a phenomenon. We have given 
it a name. We have identified it as in the current. We 
have asked whether it be not always in the current ; and 
whether it be not itself a current ; whatever compan- 
ions or coexistences it may have along with it under the 
introspections of the mind. We have not denied a sense 
to Will, and to Emotion, and to Knowledge, and to 
Consciousness, or to any other of the accredited words 
in the vocabulary of man. But then we do not deny 
the meaning of house, or the meaning of structure, or 
the meaning of shelter, or the meaning of walls and 
roof; and yet we should be sorry to suppose that, to- 
tally distinct as these meanings were, it necessarily 
came to be the case that the thing intended to be de- 
scribed might not in the end turn up as in its sub- 
stance the same. 

Now let us take these diverse phenomena. We will 
encounter three of them in the next chapter. We will 
show that Consciousness, Emotion and Cognition 
are but Perception in its three aspects. We will 
then go on to each of them, and show, by a considera- 
tion of each, the whole psychological nature of what 



Chap. VI.] Consciousness. 27 

we call Perception. There will intervene the Laws of 
Perception. We will then go on to Will, and show, 
what no man will be ready to suppose, that Will is not 
a Faculty, because not even a simple operation of the 
mind, but a highly complex operation, in part of per- 
ceptions of cause and of power, which are the last to 
be acquired. A little infant scarce has a will, when 
its simpler visions are of the very brightest kind. We 
will show that Will, not philologically, but in esse, 
means Perception, just as house means building, and 
that Kant's favorite analysis into Cognition, Emotion 
and Conation will stand very well a philological test, 
but will utterly break down as dividing actual per- 
ceptions. 

We will then treat of Abstraction and Comparison, 
and other miscellaneous acts, reducing them by the 
same analysis ; hoping to make clear as the conclusion 
of this First Book — and the foundation of those that are 
to follow it, this philosophical dogma : — That there 
is nothing consciously in the mind but different 
Perceptions. 

CHAPTER V. 

THREE ASPECTS OF PERCEPTION. 

There are three aspects of Perception, — Conscious- 
ness, Emotion, and Cognition. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CONSCIOUSNESS. 

LET no one suppose when we speak of Conscious- 
ness as an aspect of Perception that we mean an in- 
stance of it. If Consciousness were a mere instance of 



28 Psychology. [Book I. 

Perception, it would answer well enough to the state- 
ment that there was nothing else than Perception in 
the current of the mind ; but it would bring at once 
the cavil as to an over-generalization. ' True enough,' 
it would be said ; ' there is a cognizing feature in Con- 
sciousness. The element of sight or vision or mental 
discerning is seen in it ; but sight of a blue cloud, and 
sight of a joyful sense, and sight of a mental volition, 
are so intrinsically different, that the generalization is 
harmful. We have simplified too much. And it 
will be a gain in analyzing to unloose that clasp again, 
and separate these forms of perceiving into different 
faculties and acts/ 

Vital, therefore, to our scheme, is the analysis which 
makes Consciousness not an instance but an aspect of 
Perception, that is to say, a mere word for describing 
one fact about Perception. It belongs to every per- 
ception. It belongs only to Perception. It is but a 
name for Perception, as dwelling is the name for a 
house ; not that Perception means Consciousness, for 
they imply different traits of the same mental act ; but 
it means Consciousness just as much as color means 
light ; and we know that nothing can be received by 
the eye (unless it be darkness) except light, and, 
moreover, nothing, just as obviously, but the one simple 
thing color. 

I know we are conscious of volition, and conscious 
of emotion, and if these acts, I mean volition and 
emotion, were not perceptions, I would be willing to 
admit that Consciousness in this case was a special 
and distinguishable instance. But recollect, we intend 
to prove that these are perceptions. It is but an in- 
stance of Perception being conscious of itself. And as 
it is impossible to conceive of a perception being un- 



Chap. VII.] All Consciousness Perception. 29 

conscious ; as an unconscious perception would be an 
absurdity, like a sight that was not a sight, or a per- 
ceiving that did not perceive, — I think I, am back at 
my thesis that Perception and Consciousness are one ; 
not one significantly, for color and light are not one, 
but one in the act meant ; that is Perception is called 
Perception because of one aspect of the act, and Con- 
sciousness just simply because of another. 

If a friendly hand steps in to help us to a thought, 
viz., Consciousness rather refers , to self, and Percep- 
tion to not-self, we discard the discrimination. Per- 
ception also refers to self. That is, the word has 
been mixed with ideas about a perceiving power or 
agent. It takes an agent to perceive, just as much 
as it takes an agent to be conscious. And one word 
no more implies a thinking agent than the other. Both 
start the ghost of self equally and the ghost of other 
things. There is no difference between Consciousness 
and Perception except a very great one, that while 
they are descriptive of the one act, one is descriptive 
of the perceiving in itself, and the other of an aware- 
ness of itself inseparable from the very nature of per- 
ceiving. 

CHAPTER VII. 

ALL CONSCIOUSNESS PERCEPTION. 

CONSCIOUSNESS is not a vague sense like warmth 
stealing over the system. It is not a dull guard like a 
duenna watching her charge, and sleeping sometimes, 
just keeping an eye to Perception busy at its work ; 
but it is minute like Perception itself. You take an 
ether and pour it on type. Let it be of the rarest 
sort. And let it harden like adamant, and without 



30 Psychology. [Book I. 

shrinking in a grain ; and it will not take the print of 
what it rests upon with such inimitable edge as Con- 
sciousness of the Perception that it unveils. Conscious- 
ness is Perception. 

Let me be conscious, for example, of a sensation of 
color. I am not conscious of a vague expanse, but I am 
conscious of everything revealed in the sensation. If 
it be the color of the blue sky, I am conscious of just 
now much is perceived : the shape of the clouds, and 
their edge, and their angles, and their surface, their 
difference of hue, and their difference of place, and 
their difference of figure, the moon and stars, or a 
comet, or a nebular mass, if these are the things that 
we are conscious that we perceive. And if they raise 
any emotion, we are conscious of the length and course 
and degree of the emotion. If they move the will, we 
are conscious of it, and exactly what will and how much. 
We are conscious of just as much as we perceive, and 
we are conscious of it just as clearly. And conscious- 
ness gets all that perception gets, and will report it to 
us in the way of metaphysical research. And there is 
no part of consciousness that is sensational, or that we 
merely feel in contradistinction to a detailed intelli- 
gence reporting everything that belongs to the per- 
ception photographically to the mind. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ALL PERCEPTION CONSCIOUSNESS. 

On the other hand all Perception is Consciousness. 

Not only is all Consciousness Perception, that is, 
every conscious gaze a perceiving, and all of it a per- 
ceiving of that that we are conscious of, but all Percep- 



Chap. VIII.] All Perception Consciousness. 31 

tion is conscious. And if all Perception is conscious, 
that is, every part of it ; — if when I perceive a triangle 
all is conscious — the perception of the sides conscious, 
and the angles and the interlying space ; if when I 
perceive a strain of music all is conscious, the changes, 
and the tone, and the time, and the note; to the last 
tittle of the perceptive thought that I have of any part 
of it, I think you cannot refuse the verdict that the 
whole of Perception is Consciousness. For if there be 
not the smallest part of the whole perceptive pheno- 
menon that is not conscious, and that of the same 
realities, the perception and the consciousness may be 
different indeed in what they are intended to denote, 
but not in what they are intended to cover as phe- 
nomena of mind. 

And therefore, intending as we do to reject Percep- 
tion in its modern sense, and " Intuitive Beliefs " as 
utterly absurd ; intending to reject the Hamiltonian 
idea of a Regulative Faculty, and all that German 
creed about a ver?iunft and a ver stand and their intrin- 
sic difference ; intending to deny Brown's teachings 
about Cause and Effect, and all the different ideas 
about Substance that have been asserted hitherto, we 
are glad to have such a fund in Perception and Con- 
sciousness itself. Outness and Substance and Ego and 
God and Matter and Cause and Power and Will and 
Muscle and Motion, when they have fairly given up to 
us all that we perceive, that is all of which we are con- 
scious, by the help too of memory and certain continu- 
ous features of our thought, will be found to have given 
us a stock in trade on which we may boldly start with- 
out any help of these Kantian or Cartesian ideas. 



32 Pyschology. [Book I. 

CHAPTER IX. 

EMOTION. 

EMOTION is that feeling of Pleasure or Pain that is 
found in every Perception. 

This itself will be regarded as a new doctrine. 

But take the slenderest touch upon the person ; 
take the most, cursory thought ; take the perception 
that two and twelve make fourteen ; take anything — 
I think it will be hard to find any act so entirely 
indifferent as not to give any pain or any pleasure, or 
perhaps one or two forms of pleasure of a microscopic 
sort along with it to the mind. 

We will show hereafter that pain and pleasure are 
what keep thoughts in the current, and that if these 
sink into a condition of indifference they fail of their 
place and yield to others that are elbowing into the 
mind. (See B. I., Chap. XXV.). 

What is this pain or pleasure ? 

Some may say : — Too wide a generalization again ! 

The pain of an aching tooth, or the pain of a halt- 
ing line in poetry — what possibly have they together? 

Now I confess that our theory in this respect must 
rise or fall with our theory of Perception. 

If Perception be too widely generalized, and, above 
all, if we do not bring Volition particularly to be an 
instance under it, then I admit that Emotion will be 
confused. But if Perception be the only conscious 
phenomenon, Emotion cannot be more diverse than 
that. And, in fact, that will be the very rule of the 
diversity. Emotions will have the same diversities as 
Perceptions. If an aching tooth and a halting rhyme 
give different forms of pain, so are they different 
objects of Perception. 



Chap. X.] All Emotion Perception. 33 

We must watch the proof. 

If Perception proves good enough as a fasciculum 
for all our thoughts, Emotion will answer for all our 
Pains and Pleasures. 

CHAPTER X. 

ALL EMOTION PERCEPTION. 

But now Emotion is Perception. 

I put my hand upon the stove ; — what do I per- 
ceive? I perceive heat. What more do I experience? 
I experience pleasure. Now is the heat first, and the 
pleasure afterward ? Is the heat one feeling, and the 
pleasure another ? Is not the pleasure the feeling of 
heat ? And if you come to understand yourself per- 
fectly, is not the confusion that hangs about the thing, 
only and entirely this, that philologically both terms 
are needed ; that philologically they are entirely differ- 
ent ; but that out of this philologic discrepance two feel- 
ings do not emerge, but only one, called pleasure, as 
discrepant from pain, and called heat,* as discrepant 
from other perceptions or emotions of sense, all of 
which are either pains or pleasures. 

If I have an emotion, therefore, I have a perception ; 
and the emotion and perception are the same. 

If I have an emotion of pleasure at seeing a wire 
bridge, or in reading a line of Homer, of course there 
is something in the bridge or in the poetry that gives 
the emotion. It is not the paint or the cold iron in the 
one, or the printer's ink or the shape of the letters in 
the other. It is something that can be distinguished in 

* Heat as a mere word, is rather objective than a feeling. Sense of 
heat would be a truer expression. Heat is the attributed something, 
evidences of which are otherwise visible, that produces the sense or 
leads to the emotion. 



34 Pyschology. [Book I. 

our contemplation. Now be it the curve of the bridge, 
or be it the smoothness of the line, certain it is that the 
pleasure-imparting feature must be perceived. It is in 
perceiving the curve or the rhyme that the pleasure is 
received. And consciousness will bear out unquestion- 
ably this assertion — that while perceiving the curve and 
perceiving the pleasure are different acts (see chapter on 
Abstraction), perceiving the curve and perceiving what 
gives the pleasure are not different acts. Perceiving 
the curve and perceiving the pleasure are different acts, 
just as perceiving a tune and perceiving the sweetness 
of a tune are different acts. This last is an abstrac- 
tion from the other. But perceiving the curve and per- 
ceiving the beauty of the curve are not different acts, for 
the beauty cannot be abstracted. It is not a separate 
perception. It is only a convenient term for the power 
of the curve to give the pleasure.* And, therefore, the 
perception of the beauty, and the perception of the 
curve are one, and the emotion is a fact of the per- 
ceiving, a thing that belongs to it, an aspect of the 
perceiving act, a thing that can be separated from it as 
color can be from light, but a thing that cannot be sep- 

* I am not speaking now of beauty in a sort of reflected sense. 
These dualties work the mystery. It is too early to grapple with this 
other sense. I am speaking of beauty as the trait of the curve that gives 
pleasure. I say, that is not to be separated from the curve itself. There 
is a meaning of beauty that makes it a sort of painting of the pleasure 
upon the curve outwardly ; much as though the curve were blue, and the 
blueness, though a sense, were imagined as painted upon it. It will be 
very necessary to go into these things. Beauty does not happen to be 
a name of the feeling (and therefore we have to say, sense of beauty) ; 
but meaning generally the empirical trait that produces the feeling, it 
also makes objective the pleasure itself ; that is, it sometimes means the 
emotional sense, as though it were actually painted on the curved line. 
These niceties, though they are mere dictionary facts, still have to be 
gone into to keep the subject clear. We will advert to them again on a 
better occasion. 



Chap. XI.] All Perception, Emotion. 35 

arated from it in any sense of one not being a mere 
feature of the other. 



CHAPTER XI. 

ALL PERCEPTION EMOTION. 

If I come in from the cold, and hold my hand to 
the fire, all my Perception must be Emotion in that 
particular case. My perception of a genial heat, and 
my perception of a genial pleasure, are identically the 
same, except, with reference to the old and never-to- 
be-forgotten fact that heat and pleasure are signifi- 
cantly different. Philologically they are diverse and 
usefully discriminated ; pleasure indicating that aspect 
of the heat in which it is opposite to pain, and heat 
that aspect of pleasure in which it is of a distinct per- 
ceptive kind. 

If I lie upon my bed at night, and hear a strain of 
harmony, the consciousness must be the same ; all the 
harmony being pleasure, and all the pleasure being 
harmony ; care only being taken, as in the other case, 
to preserve happily discriminated the philologic force 
of both expressions. 

Now, if Perception and Emotion be the same in 
these simple acts, why may they not be in all experi- 
ence? 

My Perception of a bridge is ten thousand things. 
My Perception each moment is a crush of contending 
experiences. If I could analyze each one into parts, 
and bring down my thought to the simplest alphabet 
of seeings, is it not obvjous that the point could never 
come where the heat or the harmony or the scent, 
confessedly emotional throughout, should cease to be 



36 Psychology. [Book I. 

so, and where colder thoughts supervene that are not 
entirely pervaded with the character of Emotion? 

Is not the obvious theory that comes out when we 
bring the thing in this way under the edge of each 
man's conscious consideration, that he has no unemo- 
tional ideas ; that feeling is as inseparable from thought 
as light from color ; that a man faels a truth if he ever 
sees it, and sees a truth only when he feels it ; and 
that that feeling is so co-constitutional with the sight, 
that all the emotion perceives and all the perception 
feels equipollently and alike all that is the object of the 
one or of the other ? 

CHAPTER XII. 

COGNITION. 

Cognition is that aspect of Perception that gives 
it its name ; that is, its perceptive or apprehensive 
aspect. 

Knowledge, as we shall see hereafter, is a word of 
two meanings. It means Conscious or Unconscious 
Knowledge. Unconscious Knowledge is nothing more 
than the power to know when the occasion arrives ; as 
when I know Greek, or know my own interest. It is 
merely potential knowledge ; and is in fact nothing 
more than the perceptive capacity, however it may be 
fed. The matters so knowable are called knowledge 
in the objective sense. 

Conscious Knowledge is all that belongs to the 
present inquiry, as when I say, ' I know blueness, for I 
have the sensation now ; ' or, * I know Tightness,' or, if 
you please, ' I know the beautiful, for I am looking at 
benevolence or looking at a lily this very moment.' 

It is true that Conscious Knowledge is to be 



Chap. XIII.] All Cognition Perception. 37' 

divided* into Intuitive and Empirical, and Empirical 
into three sorts or species easily distinguished ; each 
and all of which, if conscious, are in the current, and if 
in the current are mere perceptions ; unless some one 
can still show us something consciously cognitive that 
is not perceptive, that is, not a difference in sense only 
between Perception and Cognition (which would be 
easy, as no words are absolute synonyms), but a dif- 
ference numerically between a perceiving viewed as 
emotional or conscious, and a cognizing viewed as 
informing us at the time of this or that perceivable 
reality. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

ALL COGNITION PERCEPTION. 

If Cognition included Unconscious Knowledge, of 
course Perception, which is a conscious act, would have 
nothing to do with so much of Cognition as included 
the unconscious part. But it has been already intimated 
that Unconscious or Potential Knowledge is not knowl- 
edge at all in a sense pertinent to our inquiry. It is 
an extending of the word Knowledge to take in another 
and ulterior fact as to what the mind might could or 
would cognize in certain circumstances. All Cognition 
is Perception ; but it must be distinctly understood as 
conscious Cognition at the time. This word Knowl- 
edge will continue to give us difficulty, till, under the 
head of Logic, we discriminate its use, and dissect off 
that sense which answers to Perception, and that wider 
sense which means only what could be perceived if the 
proper occasion could be given. In this last sense, of 
course, it is not true that all Cognition is Perception. 

* See Logic. 



38 Psychology. [Book I. 

Again, if there be any such things as Intuitive 
Beliefs, Cognition is not Perception. The doctrine of 
Intuitive Beliefs pretends a knowledge of many things, 
and pretends to give it firmly and beyond a cavil, and, 
when I come to understand the ground, it is not that 
I perceive them, or perceive the proof of them, but 
that I have an inborn conviction or Intuitive Belief 
of what I am said to know. 

I cannot stop for this doctrine, because it belongs 
to another place.* I can only challenge it. I frankly 
admit that it is very prevalent. It is the most catholic 
error of modern times. If it were true, all my theory 
would be at an end. If it be false, I can easily trust to 
your consciousness to admit that Cognition, unhelped- 
out by any mysterious principle of belief, must fit itself 
distinctly to what is left, and must be a perceiving act 
in every case of a conscious cognition. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

ALL PERCEPTION COGNITION. 

WHETHER all Cognition be a Perception, which 
may be doubted, if Substance or Causation are cogniz- 
able by being believed without being perceived, still 
it would remain true that all Perception is Cognition. 

One can prove this by imagining the opposite. 
Can we perceive anything without knowing it ? and is 
there any part of the perceived thing, or of the perceiv- 
ing itself, that we do not perceive and therefore know ? 
The whole of Perception, therefore, is knowledge. 

* See Logic. 



Chap. XVI.] Words. 39 



CHAPTER XV. 



NO SIMPLE PERCEPTIONS. 



I WISH here to interject a chapter setting forth the 
fact that there are no simple perceptions. It will bear 
upon Definition and the use of words. I do not mean 
only that there are no simple perceptions that occur in 
thinking, or that there are none found in nature. I 
mean far more than that : I mean that we cannot con- 
ceive of a simple perception. By no abstraction of 
thought can we have what by a change of term may 
be called a simple idea. A note of music might seem 
near it, but can we separate that from time, and from 
the change from silence to the audible note? Color 
does not answer so well, for it is inseparable both from 
space and figure. 

All thought is complex, therefore ; and perception 
is a complex act ; and the simplest is the beginning 
of complex knowledge. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

WORDS. 

If there are no simple perceptions, it follows of 
course that there are no simple words. If we cannot 
conceive of simple ideas, and yet could call them by 
names, it would follow that we could call by names 
things that we cannot conceive. 

Words are the names of perceptions, using percep- 
tion in all of its three meanings. They are not more 
numerous than perceptions ; for though consciousness, 
emotion, and cognition are but three aspects of the one 
perception, yet perception can bend an eye upon each 



40 Psychology. [Book I. 

of these three aspects, and they become, alike, percep- 
tions in turn. Color, light, and beauty may be each 
peculiarities of the same illumination, but I can bend 
a perception upon each, and have a perception of each 
peculiarity. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

DEFINITION. 

If there are no simple ideas, the common maxim 
that a simple idea cannot be defined is, of course, a 
philosophical nullity. 

The doctrine has been that a simple idea cannot be 
defined, but that a complex one can be ; and that the 
province of definition, as a consequence, is the treat- 
ment of complex ideas. 

The reason that a simple idea cannot be defined, 
has been thought to be that it cannot be made sim- 
pler ; and that, therefore, consciousness must be called 
in, as in the instance of yellow color, for example, with- 
out definition, to witness the meaning of the idea. 

Now it is a fundamental article of our metaphysi- 
cal belief that this is what consciousness has to do in 
every case ; that there are no absolute definitions ; that 
what has been asserted usually of simple ideas is totally 
untrue of them, for the all-prevailing consideration that 
no such ideas are possible ; but that what has been 
asserted of simple ideas is true of all ideas, and very 
much for the reasons that have been employed to 
establish that impossible proposition. 

Definition, which means the fixing of a boundary, is 
a thing that has never been reached in any conceivable 
instance. We hold that it only approximates an idea, 



Chap. XVII.j Definition. 4 1 

so that it can be perceived in consciousness. We do 
not deny the word, or discard it at all ; we reverence 
all language ; but we hold that definition marks the 
boundaries of thought about as well as a pointer dog 
a flock of partridges. It is a matter of hints, exceed- 
ingly successful if the mind can lay hold of the 
thing intended. And the proof that it is nothing more 
is to be found in the fact, first of all, that men are 
never agreed in definition, and second, that no abso- 
lute definition can be quoted in all the literature of 
mankind. 

It appears, therefore, that there are no simple ideas ; 
that there are, therefore, no simple words ; that words 
from the necessity of the case are very imperfectly de- 
fined ; and that definition is but a hint thrown into our 
consciousness. The noblest definition is preponder- 
antly undefined. Take the most exact that are ever 
given. They have no boundary. Take the most sim- 
ple. They are complex enough to be incorrect. Labor 
to the very last, and you will devise a thing that shades 
out into something else. " God is a Spirit, infinite, 
eternal and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, 
holiness, justice, goodness, and truth " : a famous defini- 
tion no doubt, yet, in fact, what does it define ? What 
is a spirit ? How is God a Spirit ? * Are not all spirits 
of which we have a bounded comprehension our 
spirits ? And are not our spirits totally different, and 
scarcely analogous in the most distant respects, to the 
Almighty ? 

* We doubt much whether the passage, Jo. iv. 23, means as definitely 
" God is a Spirit," as it is translated. Christ is speaking of worshipping 
" in spirit," and then adds by way of confirmation, " Spirit is God." That 
is, we are to worship with our higher lights and feelings, and those 
are gifts. " The Lord is that Spirit." If we live, it is not we that live, 
but Christ that liveth in us. 



42 Psychology. [Book I. 

Definition, therefore, like thought itself, is rather a 
hint than a direct translation of the reality. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE LAWS OF PERCEPTION. 

If consciousness, though a separate idea, is not so 
separate an act as to forbid the thought that there is 
nothing consciously in the mind but Perception, the 
Laws of Perception can give us no trouble as separate 
consciousnesses, or indeed by any separate claim what- 
ever. The Laws of Perception are the mere order of 
being perceived that is found by observation in the 
perceptions themselves, 

I am conscious that perception is incessant ; but 
when I say I am conscious of that law, I do not mean 
that I am conscious of the law at all as I am conscious 
of the perception ; I do not mean that there are two 
things in the current, perceptions and laws of percep- 
tion, which I see jostling each other as coordinate 
phenomena. I only mean, I see perceptions. And I 
am conscious of the law that they are incessant, only 
as another way of saying that I am conscious of per- 
ceptions always ; which is really, that I am conscious 
of perception, and just conscious of it all the time. 

Now I do not aver that my being conscious of per- 
ception always is in such a sense no different phenom- 
enon from perception as to be involved in perception. 
On the contrary it is an inexplicable law. There is no 
reason in the act why it should be always our act, i. e. 
why it should continue unceasingly. Yet though not 
involved as consciousness for example is in the very 
act of perception, in such a sense as that perception 



Chap. XIX.] Perception as Incessant. 43 

might not occur without it, yet it is involved in the 
act of perception in such a sense as that it is no sepa- 
rate object of consciousness, and is in fact the mere 
peculiarity of perception that it is seen to be con- 
sciously incessant. 

The Laws of Perception are six : — that it is Inces- 
sant ; that it follows the Strongest Emotion ; that it is 
Fading ; that it affects the body in its nervous, muscular, 
and sanguineous systems ; that it is Continuous ; and 
that it is Recurring. These six are fundamental and 
inexplicable. We can give no cause, though we can 
see the final cause. We cannot reduce these six to 
anything more simple in the mind ; yet we can plainly 
see why the six should be so ordered, and how the 
power, wisdom, and goodness of God can be clearly 
manifested by the results of these comprehensive Laws 
of our Perception 

CHAPTER XIX. 

LAW I : — PERCEPTION AS INCESSANT. 

Perception, in our waking moments, is absolutely 
unceasing. 

To suppose this in the conscious nature of percep- 
tion is an absurdity. We are conscious of perception. 
We have found that it is unceasing. But that we are 
conscious that it is in its nature unceasing is an ab- 
surdity in terms. 

That the mind is essentially active means only that 
we observe it to be. That the mind cannot close its 
eye is false. It does so to all but a few passing im- 
pressions. That the mind cannot be conceived of as 
at rest is utterly an error. It probably is so in sleep, 
and if not, is always conceived of as being. And if it is 



44 Psychology. [Book I. 

said, It cannot be conceived of when we are awake, 
that is a truism, and only means that the mind is 
observed to be awake, and its perceptions incessant. 



CHAPTER XX. 

PERCEPTION AS TRANSIENT. 

In mentioning six laws of perception we have in- 
tended laws that are primary, and which are all the 
laws that are witnessed in the conscious current. Yet 
these laws combine into others which are of course not 
primary, which are convenient to mention, and which 
have much to do as merciful provisions of thought. 
Such a law is the law of Perception as Transient. 

Perception as Incessant would be very grievous if 
there were no provision to shift and change it. An 
eternal looking at one thing like the Sphinx in the 
desert would be intellectual death. There must be a 
scene-shifter. Such an effect has this law of Tran- 
sience. It is not a primordial law, but flows from two 
others, the second and third as above enumerated. If 
we could wait, it would emerge when those come to be 
considered (Chaps. XXV. and XXVI.), but we need it 
now. Several laws that we shall notice are not pri- 
mary, were not mentioned in our list, but are conve- 
nient consequences to mark thus early in our discussion. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

PERCEPTION AS LIMITED. 

It will be seen hereafter that Recurrence, which is 
one of the laws of Perception, throws within its reach, 
if I may use a material expression, great stores of ob- 



Chap. XXI.] Perception as Limited. 45 

jects. It will be seen still further on, that Sensation 
is another great store-house of possible perception. 
And indeed each moment in the body presses upon 
the scene an amount of objects that would make mil- 
lions and millions of our present amount of conscious- 
ness. Perception selects, therefore ; or to express it in 
another shape, there is a law of Perception as Limited. 
We cannot state the limit, or say how large a picture 
may come upon our conscious vision. We cannot even 
state how small a one may ; for, as we have already 
shown, a simple perception is never even conceived of 
by the mind. It is exceedingly far from being the case 
that the mind has but one idea in it at a time if by idea 
be meant one simple conception, just as a printer takes 
up one simple type. But if by idea be meant more 
what the names implies, IDEA, the thing seen, the thing 
actually perceived, then we are moving in a circle; the 
mind's having but one idea means only that it has what 
it has,' one mind-full or one perception; and the truth 
in consciousness is, that though these minds-full are 
very different, yet they are limited ; or in other words 
the mind does not go off discursing over whole 
horizons, or all stores both of sense and memory, but 
measures out for itself dainty portions ; a law that we 
will find not primordial but depending upon others 
that we will mention ; but then a noble trait, making 
all the difference between wide and discursive nothing- 
nesses, and a series of pictures of convenient form and 
connected management in our vision. 



46 Psychology. [Book I. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

PERCEPTION AS A CONSCIOUS CURRENT. 

Perception, therefore, being Incessant, and then 
being also Transient, and then, still more than that, 
being also Limited, we have as a consequence, or rather 
as the expression of these three laws in one, the phe- 
nomenon with which we set out, viz. the phenomenon 
of a Conscious Current ; in which we found, first very 
modestly, that there were perceptions, secondly, that 
there were always perceptions, third, only perceptions, 
and now that the Conscious Current itself is but the 
effect of three laws (two of which are to be traced to 
others), namely, the laws that we have already con- 
sidered, that is to say, the Incessant, Transient, and 
Limited nature of the one phenomenon of mental per- 
ception. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

PERCEPTIONS AS ASSOCIATED IN ORDER. 

It is found by experience that perceptions are 
associated in order. They do not follow each other in 
utter confusion, but by method. When they are 
ideas of sense, of which we shall speak hereafter, we 
do not see the corner of a house mixed up with the 
summit of a mountain, or the hind legs of a cow with 
a rock that may be in sight beyond her ; but we per- 
ceive the cow or the house as a collected whole, and 
are blind to the rock and the mountain. We are con- 
scious of sights that mean something, and let stray 
adjuncts fall out of our knowledge at the time. 

In the regions of the past the law is similar ; it is 



' Chap. XXIII.] Perceptions as in Order. 47 

one of eclectic pictures or grouping. Memory does not 
bring to us indigested heaps, but curt topics. And in 
the current, thought follows thought not wildly but in 
form. The order of perception is the most beautiful 
order in the universe. Now how is this? 

It is not an order which the first conscious experi- 
ence detects, and which becomes an ultimate phenom- 
enon. We find a cause for it. And though cause is 
a new idea, which we have not yet the facilities to 
explain, yet we must use the word like many another, 
in anticipation of its detected sense. 

Perception is not in ranks of beautiful and con- 
nected pictures as a mere statical fact with no material 
at all to go further and explain it, but it is suggested 
as well as associated. We arrive at the conclusion 
that perception occasions perception, and occasions 
connected and apt perception ; in other words that 
the beauty of their order is not a final and inexplicable 
fact in our perceptive consciousness, creatingytherefore, 
a distinct and original law, but that we may state 
further in two particulars : — First, that there is a cause 
at work which produces the order, and second, that 
the operation of the cause springs from the laws already 
stated of the perceptions of the mind: 

I had thought of having two chapters, one headed 
Perceptions as Associated, and the other, Perceptions as 
Suggested; the one referring to the mere order of per- 
ceptions, and the other to the power of perceptions to 
produce that order, the one by suggesting another ; but 
as neither law is original, and both have been suffi- 
ciently premised, I go on rather to the laws which are 
original, considering, however, as we go by, that pro- 
lific source of metaphysical debate, the Laws of Asso- 
ciation, as they have been attempted to be method- 
ized in the catalogues of different times. 



48 Psychology. [Book I. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE LAWS OF ASSOCIATION. 

By the Laws of Association are intended the laws 
of a law. And it is exceedingly important to find out 
what that law is before we attempt to arrange the laws 
that regulate it. 

Now that law is in fact two. We have already seen 
that there is a law of perceptions as having order, and 
another as producing order, the one phantasmical sim- 
ply, the other causal. By the one I say, I have seen 
my thoughts, and they occur to me in beautiful order; 
by the other I say, I have seen my thoughts, and they 
produce order, that is, one suggests another, and the 
rule of the suggestion proves to be a regular and 
beautiful series in the mind. 

Now the laws of the one law are the laws of the 
order ; what it consists in ; whether contiguity, or re- 
semblance, or causation. And the laws of the other law 
are the laws of suggestion, viz. what it is in one thought 
that produces another, and what the laws of relation 
are between one thought and another which can be 
supposed to be connected with the rising of one upon 
the occasion of the other in the mind. 

These two sets of laws, however, need not be so 
very discriminatingly enumerated, and that for two 
reasons, first, that men have never agreed upon them, 
and, second, that where they have in part agreed, the 
lists of the first have been largely made up of the same 
things as are found in the lists of the other. Conti- 
guity, for example ! Where men have talked of the 
mere order of perceptions, they have talked of conti- 
guity as one of the forms of order. And where they 



Chap. XXIV.] The Laws of Association. 49 

have talked of absolute suggestion, they have talked 
of contiguity as one of the suggesting laws. 

We intend to dispense with all these categories ; 
and intending that, we merely glance at them. We 
admit, of course, that contiguity suggests ideas ; and 
if a man is like his neighbor, the idea of one is apt to 
suggest the idea of the other : and resemblance, there- 
fore,, and relation, and, let me say, order of any possible 
description, is apt to suggest anything else in the 
order. And, therefore, the very wideness of the range 
might move our suspicions. Any possible form of 
relation, I don't care what it is, be it cause or se- 
quence or contrast, — any possible connected thing, — is 
basis for suggestion. And it may well excite the 
doubt whether anything that must be so loose-twisted 
when we come to the detail, can be the promising clue 
to lead us to account for the beautiful series of our 
perceptions. 

We are satisfied, therefore, with the remark, that 
Contiguity or Resemblance, sometimes both, sometimes 
neither, sometimes other things, have been enumerated 
by different philosophers, sometimes as the rule, some- 
times as the cause, of the associated order of percep- 
tions ; that the entire difference of opinion as to what 
do and what do not constitute the catalogue, awakens 
the reasonable fear that catalogue-making of this wide 
and particular kind is not the practicable analysis; 
that a study of these oft repeated attempts would 
seem to show that ORDER of any kind is the rule of the 
current ; that any conceivable species of relation or 
connection or contrast— whatsoever in fact makes 
thought interesting or vivid or progressive, — tends to 
enter ; and therefore, that while contiguity and resem- 
blance and all these are doubtless laws of the current, 



50 Psychology. [Book I, 

it is expedient to go beneath these mere instances of 
order, and find what more original law occasions and 
includes all these multifarious characteristics of the train 
suggested or associated. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

LAW II : — LAW OF THE STRONGEST EMOTION. 

THE law of perception as Transient, the law of per- 
ception as Limited, the law of perception as in a Current, 
and the law of perception as in an Orderly Current, that 
is, as associated and suggested, have all been said not 
to be original, and must all depend, if that be the case, 
upon some other characteristics of perception, that 
could occasion and include them. 

Now one characteristic of perception is the advan- 
tage that those perceptions have to get a place in the 
current that can rouse our emotions. If I am sitting 
in an open landscape listlessly gazing into space, it is a 
familiar fact that plenty of things may happen that 
sensation never reaches. The roar of a mill may be 
utterly unknown to me. Sense is an eclectic instru- 
ment. It takes what interests it. The eye of the 
heaven may directly look at me and I see absolutely 
nothing. For to suppose that I hear all the myriad 
sounds that are about me, and see all the sights, is 
contradicting my sense. My sense reports that I have 
some limited perceptions, and beyond them have no 
perceptive consciousness. 

But now let a voice call. It may not be half as loud 
as the thunder of the mill ; yet. I hear it instantly. 

Sense and memory are two latent stores, and I 
take out of them my limited perceptions. There are 
shoals of perceptions in the past, and how they come 



Chap. XXV.] Law of the Strongest Emotion. 5 1 

back to me is a thing hereafter to be considered. But 
they do not come back to me in shoals. Just as in a 
splendid landscape I get report of things that strike 
me and nothing else, so in the field of memory the bird 
or the flower or the patch of cloud or the waterfall may 
not emerge to consciousness, but something I care for, 
something I feel when it is perceived, and, therefore, 
something that will keep my thought moving in the 
path of fresh emotion, rather than scouring over desert 
wastes that have no life and no amusement in their 
history. 

I derive, therefore, a law that I will call the Law of 
the Strongest Emotion ; and I will define it to be that 
law by which those perceptions that are within reach 
of the mind, either from sense or memory, tend to come 
up into it, which, other things being equal, will be at 
the time the most pain or the most pleasure. 

Now Contiguity and Resemblance and all those 
other laws fall under this ; for the most orderly thoughts 
are of course the most pleasant thoughts. Thought 
becomes practical. A cow is a more pleasant thing to 
look at than the tail of a cow associated with the 
branch of a tree and part of a mill-race. We are 
pleased with whole pictures. Thought becomes profit- 
able when of an orderly kind ; and, therefore, addition- 
ally pleasant. And from this kind law, that emotional 
perceptions shall emerge, Providence educes the whole 
theory of our associations, namely, that nearness and 
likeness or relation or order of any sort shall characterize 
the current, for the one satisfactory and perfect prin- 
ciple that what moves us shall characterize it, and order 
of whatever sort is more calculated for perceptive 
emotion than a chaos of jumbled sights without law 
and without meaning in its character. 



52 Psychology. [book I. 

Here we catch a glimpse of the secret too of sug- 
gestion, as well as of association, in perception. A per- 
ception being already in the mind makes order with 
another within our reach, and not with still another. 
A song I hear interests me in connection with a friend, 
but not in some indifferent relation. I see a knife. It 
was such a knife amputated my arm. The knife and 
scene together will make a painful picture, and there- 
fore, it suggests the scene. Thought does not cause 
thought in the ordinary significance of causation. But 
perceptions, which are in a continuous flux, tend to 
have rising with them others that will make moving pic- 
tures, whether of pain or pleasure, from the one simple 
principle that perceptions have the advantage to come 
next that are perceptions of the deepest emotion. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

LAW III : — PERCEPTION AS FADING. 

We are not quite ready to generalize the whole till 
we bring in another principle ; that is, the Law of Per- 
ception as Fading. This does not flow from the last ; 
because, why should not the perception we have remain 
the strongest ? Why, when I have seen a meteor, and it 
continues the most extraordinary spectacle of the hour, 
do I not continue thinking of it, and that by the force 
of the same law, the law of the strongest emotion ? 

We need another law, therefore. If the law of the 
strongest emotion held its rule without being restricted 
by another, we should think of one thing all the time- 
We should fall into one great gulf of thought, and stay 
in it. We need a dynamic principle, to change and 
shift, that thought may move on into knowledge. And 



Chap. XXVI.] Perception as Fading. 53 

we have this by the grace of the Almighty, who has 
ordered another great principle of thought, namely, 
that it shall fade away. I put my hand upon my 
cheek, and presently I cease to feel it. This fact is 
partly bodily and partly mental. But the mental fact 
is true in all perception. It is our third great law, the 
law of Perception as Fading. It is an inexplicable law. 
I cannot trace it to the rest. But by it perception has 
hardly been originated before it begins to fade, and the 
law of a stronger emotion comes in, to push out the 
faded one, and to bring in something new, so as to 
cater for the thought in more and more varied subjects 
of contemplation. 

You understand now the reason of the fact that 
Perception as Transient is not an original law. It is 
transient because it fades, and the new thought pushes 
it out. You see also why Perception as Limited is not 
an original law. It is limited by the stronger emotion. 
Perception is pared down to the capacity of the vision, 
and fades off all the selvage of the picture, till we are 
left with that which will make the maximum impression 
on the mind. Moreover the other laws, of Perception 
in a Current, and Perception in an Orderly Current, 
all come into their place. For Perception as Fading, 
and Perception as most likely to appear when most 
emotional, and Perception as most emotional other 
things being equal when most in order, contain all 
these other laws, and account for all the beauty of the 
train in its associated order and suggestions. 



54 'Psychology. [Book I. 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE LAW OF THE STRONGEST EMOTION THE ONLY LAW OF MENTAL 
ASSOCIATION. 

I DO not mean by this of course, that the Law of 
Perception as Incessant and the Law of Perception as 
Fading are not necessary to the Law of Association. 
We have shown that they are, and in what exact way 
they are : in fact, all the laws of perception are neces- 
sary each one to every other ; but I mean that what 
are usually called laws of association, and which are 
in fact laws of a law, are all actual laws no doubt ; that 
is, causality and nearness and likeness and contrast are 
all facts that beget suggestion ; but so are any related 
peculiarities. The list might be categorically endless. 
And the primal law is that which we have noted, viz., 
that there rises into consciousness when the last per- 
ception fades, the one that we will feel the most, the 
other things that must be equal being the ease of the 
sensible impression, or the ease of the recollecting act, 
both of these things, however, having the obvious effect 
of making it more emotional. 

If there is any other primordial law, the way will be 
for its advocate to bring it forward. And till then the 
strongest argument against it seems to be that no 
other one is needed, and indeed that no other one 
seems really possible, so completely does this one per- 
form the work of every possible suggestion. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

KANT'S THREE GREAT CLASSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE MIND. 

Having disposed of Consciousness, Emotion, and 
Cognition, and shown that they were but aspects of 



Chap. XXVIII.] Kant's Three Phenomena. 5 5 

Perception, and, as acts, numerically not different, it is 
time to take the most difficult opponent of our simpli- 
fying scheme, viz., Volition. 

Kant early in the promulging of his system divided 
the mental phenomena into three — the Cognitive, the 
Emotional, and the Conative. The Cognitive is near akin 
to what we have entitled Perception. The Emotional, 
according to Kant, is a separate phenomenon, and is 
the feeling of Pleasure or Pain. The Conative, to use 
a word employed by Sir William Hamilton, is the Will 
in its phenomenal nisus or conatus ; a thing, of course, 
which, we freely admit, is plainly to be apprehended in 
the current. 

It is better always to employ the words of a school 
in arranging its own defence. 

" The phenomena of which we are conscious, " says* 
Sir William Hamilton, expounding the analysis of 
Kant, " are seen to divide themselves into three great 
classes. In the first place, there are the phenomena 
of Knowledge ; in the second place, there are the phe- 
nomena of Feeling, or the phenomena of Pleasure and 
Pain ; and in the third place, there are the phenomena 
of Will and Desire. 

" Let me illustrate this by an example. I see a 
picture. Now, first of all, I am conscious of perceiving 
a certain complement of colors and figures, — I recog- 
nize what the object is. This is the phenomenon of 
Cognition or Knowledge. But this is not the only 
phenomenon of which I may be here conscious. I may 
experience certain affections in the contemplation of 
this object. If the picture be a masterpiece, the grat- 
ification will be unalloyed ; but if it be an unequal pro- 
duction, I shall be conscious perhaps of enjoyment, but 

* Lectures on Metaphysics. Boston Edition, pp. 127, 129. 



56 Psychology. [Book I. 

of enjoyment alloyed with dissatisfaction. This is the 
phenomenon of Feeling, or of Pleasure and Pain. But 
these two phenomena do not yet exhaust all of which 
I may be conscious on the occasion. I may desire to 
see the picture long, to see it often, to make it my own, 
and perhaps I may will, resolve and determine so to 
do. This is the complex phenomenon of Will and 
Desire. * * * * 

" This division of the phenomena of mind into 
the three great classes of the Cognitive faculties, the 
feelings or capacities of Pleasure and Pain, and the 
Exertive or Conative powers, I do not propose as 
original. It was first promulgated by Kant ; and the 
felicity of the distribution was so apparent, that it has 
now been long all but universally adopted in Germany 
by the philosophers of every school ; and, what is 
curious, the only philosopher of any eminence by 
whom it has been assailed ; indeed, the only philoso- 
pher of any reputation by whom it has been, in that 
country, rejected, — is* not an opponent of the Kantian 
philosophy, but one of its most zealous champions. 
To the psychologists of this country it is apparently 
wholly unknown. They still adhere to the old scho- 
lastic division into Powers of the Understanding and 
Powers of the Will ; or, as it is otherwise expressed, 
into Intellectual and Active Powers." 

Now we have already attempted to show that two 
of these phenomena, Cognition and Emotion, are the 
same in different aspects not, (as we guarded before) 
the same, as words, in respect of their significance, for 
one is significant of perception in its cognitive or appre- 
hensive aspect, and the other of preception as pleasure 
or pain. And to show that this is but naming the 

* Krug. 



Chap. XXVIII.] Kanfs Three Phenomena. 57 

same act, to abstract from it its different aspects, I 
took the simplest perceptions, like the perception of 
heat, or like the perception of a single note, or like a 
glance at the beautiful azure, and I said that the feel- 
ing of the thing and the seeing of the thing were 
numerically the same. Tell me only that part of the 
complex perception that I am pleased to have, and I can 
state three things about my being pleased in having 
it : — First, that I do not have the perception first and 
the pleasure afterward ; second, that I do not have the 
perception as one thing (i. e. the sight or the sound or 
the taste or the scent) and the pleasure as another 
thing. The perceiving is the pleasure. And, thirdly 
taking perception in its third sense, i. e. as the perceived 
thing, I do not have the perception in the one case to 
be the blue, and in the other case the beauty of the 
blue, in the one case the scent, and in the other case 
the fragrance of the scent, in one case the sound, and 
in the other case the melody of the sound, but the 
phenomenon is consciously one ; the blue and the 
beanty ; the scent and the fragrance ; the sound and 
the melody; not philologically I know, but metaphysi- 
cally and in respect of the thing perceived, — are incon- 
testably, because consciously, the very same. 

When Hamilton employs the picture, he confuses 
us by the immensity that we perceive. Such a thing 
is a forest. But let him take out the thing that gives 
the pleasure ; not the paint ; not the frame ; not the 
thread ribbing up the canvas ; not the mill ; not the 
woman ; not the horse ; not the pond, with the ducks ; 
not the thing that w r akens the comfortable home sense, 
or the amatory boy sense, or the horse-fancier or duck- 
fancier or even picture-fancier emotions ; nay, let him 
cast out from the piece all the pleasure-giving powers 



58 Psychology. [Book I. 

that it may have, apart from what he is having at the 
time ; and that perception, at the time, that he is 
having of some limited part or beautiful whole of the 
picture is itself the pleasure bearer, itself the happy 
thing. That he sees the picture, and sees the beauty 
of the picture ; that he sees the pleasure that it gives, 
and feels it ; that he perceives the beauty that he feels, 
and feels the beauty that he perceives, — are not ex- 
pressions I know of the same meaning ; as none are 
that are ever verbally different ; but they are expres- 
sions about the same act ; and are all satisfied by the 
statement that perceptions are either pains or pleasures. 
But I must go on to what chiefly concerns us now, 
the third class, or Conative phenomena of mind, or, as 
Hamilton calls them, the phenomena of Desire and 
Will. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

VOLITION. 

VOLITION is the act of the mind, and Will the 
faculty in which it is supposed to originate. This dis- 
tinction is not well kept up ; but, as we are speaking of 
the conscious current, we will choose Volition as the 
•conscious act, rather than Will which is the imagined 
faculty. 

Now what is Volition? 

Let it be said in reply that it is one of the most 
complex words of which we have any knowledge. 

Lest we spoil however the clearness of our analysis 
by making it prematurely, let us interpose at this point 
certain facts about the will that no other writer has 
noticed, as we are trusting much to them to conciliate 
regard to what may be supposed beforehand to be 
very improbable assertions. 



Chap. XXXI.] Perception Affecting the Body. 59 

We propose in the end to teach that Will is no 
faculty at all, or, to follow our rule of reverence for all 
language, is a most complex assemblage of faculties, 
made up of powers to perceive, and to influence by per- 
ception, as we shall presently consider : that Volition, 
as apart from the body, is no act other than percep- 
tion ; and the truths we would interpose as conciliating 
favor for what we are thus to teach, are discoveries 
that narrow in astonishingly the province of Volition. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

VOLITION HAS BUT TWO PROVINCES. 

VOLITION has but two provinces ; in the body, to 
move the muscles, and in the mind, to create attention. 

A man can will to move the voluntary muscles, 
so called, and he can will to hold an idea. Besides 
these neither hell nor heaven have any accountable 
volitions. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

LAW IV: — PERCEPTION AS IT AFFECTS THE BODY IN ITS NERVOUS, 
MUSCULAR, AND SANGUINEOUS SYSTEMS. 

In a way that cannot be explained, and that cer- 
tainly never will be explained except in the mere reci- 
tation of the phenomena, certain perceptions of the 
mind produce certain changes of the body. We per- 
ceive both ; that is, we are conscious of the percep- 
tions, and we consciously perceive the changes. When 
I perceive certain shameful things, I blush. I can be 
conscious of the perception. I can feel the blushing. 
I can see it in another. And if I am a physiologist, 
I can trace the physiological effects to any extent 



60 Psychology. [Book I. 

while I keep within the body. I can do more than 
that. I can perceive that there is a cause. Without 
anticipating too soon certain logical and ontological 
facts, I will assume as admitted for the present, that I 
can infer causation. I can conclude upon a causal 
nexus ; and that, as uniting the shameful thought and 
the irruption of the blush upon my neck and counte- 
nance. 

But really what that is that leaps across the gulf, 
and really the causal nisus that makes the shame 
affect the sanguineous system, we hope no thinker 
would ever be absurd enough even to conjecture. 

The like are a round of mental perceptions, all of 
which have certain influences upon different parts of 
the body. 

Now, when we come to consider, the parts are 
three, — the Muscular, the Nervous, and the San- 
guineous parts. 

Possibly we ought to say four ; and that the Glan- 
dular parts are also affected. 

Possibly we ought to say two ; for the Sanguineous 
parts, as in the instance of blushing, are affected 
through the muscles. Possibly the paleness of anger, 
or the flush of anger, or the hair standing erect through 
fear, or the sinking of the heart, or the sweat pouring 
out through our agony, might all be traceable to the 
muscles. The nervous system is involved, of course, 
because it acts upon the muscles. But as the muscles 
can pump the veins, and of course act and react upon 
the flux and reflux from the heart, it would pose a 
physiologist to say what the mind does or does not 
act upon in these expressions of the body. 

And, indeed, it makes no difference. What we are 
asking for are the conscious phenomena of the current. 



Chap. XXXI.] Perception Affecting the Body. 6 1 

And we see that on certain perceptions of wrong, or 
on certain perceptions of shame, or on certain percep- 
tions of risk, or of reasons for joy, the heart and indeed 
other viscera are moved, causally this work hereafter 
will show, but exactly for what cause, no mortal, and 
perhaps no angel, need ever consider. 

Metaphysically and not physiologically, therefore, 
our question is a narrow one ; and we have answered 
it by saying that all that takes place in the mind before 
a blush or before a cold sweat breaks out upon us, or 
a mortal paleness, or a joyful flush, is a perception of 
the rousing or terrifying object, with its inter-entering 
pain or pleasure. 

Let no one say, No ! There is more. There is 
the flush, or the sinking. That I admit. But these 
are the physical sensations. Let no one be confused 
as to the perception that occasions the blush by those 
other perceptions which are the sensations of the blush 
itself. 

So now in respect to Volition ; it is a phenomenon 
of mind producing a phenomenon of body. (I speak 
thus of the First Province of this Bestrebungs Ver- 
mogen as the Germans call it.) The phenomenon of 
mind is the thing we are asking after. The phenome- 
non of body tends sadly to confuse it. The phenom- 
enon of mind is something we must be actually con- 
scious of. The phenomenon of body unfortunately we 
are also conscious of as far as concerns the nisus and 
the changes in our sensations. The metaphysical prob- 
lem is to get these things thoroughly separated ; to 
get the struggle that the body makes, and the weari- 
ness and the pain and the actual effort, so far as they 
are consciously sensational, and in fact the sequence 
that we consciously advise ourselves of; that is, the 



62 Psychology. [Book I. 

sense-attempt following or rather instant upon the phe- 
nomenon of the mind, — separate, and that in the dis- 
tinctest way, from this last itself. 

I have a perception and I blush. I have this per- 
ception in the very birth, if I may speak so, of the 
conscious sensation on my cheek. 

So I have a mental something, and I move. And 
I have that mental something at the very birth of that 
conscious sense that is awakened in the muscle. The 
two are together, and it is hard to separate them. 

But certainly it is practicable to put apart that 
mental phenomenon which is not of sense, and that 
muscular swell and push which is not of mind ; which 
is merely reported of; which is throughout a sense 
perception ; not occasioned in any visible way ; and 
only intruding upon Will because it is so intimately 
mixed with that mental act anterior to its motions.* 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

MUSCULAR VOLITION. 

LET us recall our mind to the idea that one of the 
provinces of Volition is to move a certain tissue of the 
body called muscles. 

* We are reminded that we might state as a seventh law of percep- 
tion, its power to be operated on through the avenues of sense. This is 
plainly as much primordial as what we have just been discussing, viz., 
its power to operate upon the nerves and muscles. In fact physiology- 
lays both mechanisms bare. One set of nerves travels to the muscles, 
and one set of nerves travels from the sense and carries its notifies to the 
brain and mind. Doubtless the law that it is aroused by sense is a pri- 
mordial law of perceptive consciousness : so primordial, however, that 
it hides under its very prominence, and can hardly be divorced from the 
idea of the very nature of perception. We can imagine perception 
divested of all its other laws, but hardly that it .could have beeu 
awakened without there having been sensation. 



Chap. XXXII.] Muscular Volition. 63 

It is interesting to know that there are certain 
muscles of the body that the will cannot move, but 
which shame can, so that they pump up the blood to 
certain conspicuous and tale-telling parts, viz., the 
human countenance. The muscles that the will moves 
are known. The muscles that shame moves, or anger 
or dread or joy or brooding melancholy, might doubt- 
less be also known. And possibly there are some 
muscles that are not moved at all except by physical 
causes not influenced by the mind. 

1. Now if there are some muscles influenced by the 
mind, not influenced by the mere perceptions of the 
mind as in shame or fear, they are of the nature of a 
rare exception, and this is &prima facie reason against the 
idea of Volition being anything more than Perception. 

2. Again, the overbearing thought that our new 
generalization is preposterous, for that Volition is an 
imperial act, and Perception a tranquil vision ; that 
Volition has moved the world, and that Perception 
merely marks and notices ; and that the mere apo- 
thegm, Volition is Perception, is enough to stamp the 
thinker as hopelessly at variance with his species, — all 
this first-blush and very strong preoccupation against 
us, we must meet by begging people to consider how 
much which is foreign to the point is wrapped up in 
the very word Volition. 

3. For, thirdly, it takes in what belongs to sensa- 
tion. It takes in the nisus, which we have no more 
right to intermix than the flushed sense in the phe- 
nomenon of blushing. It takes in the immediate se- 
quence, which like redness is an observed fact. It 
takes it in, however, and makes much of it, and it has 
had much to do in confusing the mind. It takes 

. it in in the manufacture of choice and decision, and in 



64 Psychology. [Book I. 

most of these imperial titles of the will ; for what is 
the idea at the bottom of all these, but the sequence 
that has been observed in the body, of muscular motion 
upon the want or will of the mind ? 

Let palsy come, and it is a fine metaphysical illu- 
minator. 

Let a man be shut down to his mere mental act, 
and he finds, when the sequence ceases, as, for example, 
in a paralyzed arm, — that all that was imperial ceases, 
and he is left only with perception ; perception of want, 
perception of pain, perception of pleasure, Desire, as 
these complicated perceptions have been called ; and 
there being no more sequence, decision ceases, which 
he finds only to be a complex act made up of imme- 
diate desires and expectations. 

Moreover the nisus disappears ; and that helps to 
clear him. He wills and wishes, but makes no attempt ; 
or, to be more analytically accurate in the conscious- 
ness, he makes one part of what he meant by the 
attempt, but not the other part. He makes the men- 
tal, but not the physical attempt. That is, he makes 
so much of the attempt as was in the perception. He 
comes to the perception that this was the right time 
to act. He sees and feels that now he wants to act 
and by all previous usage must and would act and had 
always overwhelmingly expected and imperiously felt 
sure to act ; but soon perceives that so much of the 
thing as consisted in an attempted nisus was physical, 
and has departed from him ; — that it miserably con- 
founds the will ; that in look it is sensation ; that 
sensation is mental but not a part of the volition ; or 
that if it is a part, it is a part ex usu loquendi, and hence 
of this man's or that man's idea of volition as he may 
get it mixed with the more pure phenomenon. 



Chap. XXXIL] Muscular Volition. 65 

4. Moreover the philological peculiarities are sig- 
nificant. All nations originate will in wishing. All 
thought about it is traced back to the same seminal 
expression. 

The boulomai of the Greeks, the volo of the Latins, 
the vouloir of the French, the querer of the Spaniards, 
the chaphatz of the Hebrews, and like terms in other 
dialects and tongues even more so than in our own, all 
teach the lesson, that though willing and wishing are 
not the same, Will taking in more of the adjuncts 
of a complex and more extended signification, yet 
that seminally they are the same phenomenon, and 
that wishing is nothing more than complex percep- 
tions of a good, inter-entering into which is the com- 
plexity of their pains and pleasures. 

5. If anybody is conscious of anything more than 
I have described in Volition, let him state distinctly 
what that consciousness is. 

6. And, in the last place, in order to be perfectly 
fair, let me state, more than I have yet done, the whole 
of the phenomena that are seen in Muscular Volition. 

Let us suppose, in order to clear the facts, that it 
were possible for a man to cultivate the habit of blush- 
ing. I am not sure that it might not be actually pos- 
sible, so that a man might be able to blush at pleasure. 
Now how would he do it ? Not by moving the muscles 
of the blood-vessels, as he does those of the arm, but by 
the other province of will, viz., attention. He might learn, 
like many a play-actor of a high power, to attend or not 
to attend, that is, to perceive or not to perceive deeply 
and with high emotion the object of shame ; and, so, 
to blush or not to blush. Actors in private life learn* 1 
to keep back a blush. And turning pale or turning 
livid are said to be powers of wonderful tragedians. 



66 Pyschology. [Book I. 

Now when we come to treat of that second prov- 
ince (Attention) these things will be better understood. 
But for the present, what would be the difference phe- 
nomenally between blushing and moving the arm ? 

One difference would be that in blushing we would 
not have the same consciousness of a muscular nisus. 
In moving the arm we would have a sensation. In 
moving the veins we would do it mediately, and would 
have no sensation other than the flush of the blush- 
ing. The loss of the nisus, therefore, would impair 
the phenomenon of will. And yet the sequence would 
remain, and, therefore, much of the imperial act. 

Now what is the inference ? A man blushes at 
pleasure, and a man moves at pleasure. Where is the 
difference ? The blushing is operated by nerve and 
muscle, and the moving by nerve and muscle. The 
blushing is an immediate sequence, and the moving an 
immediate sequence, and both caused by something in 
the current. There is a nisus in one case, and no 
nisus in the other, and a plain deficiency in this other 
of the usual character of Volition. There is a direct- 
ness in the one case, and an indirectness (on account 
of the interposition of shame), in the other ; and yet 
both are acts of will, and both act upon the nerves, 
and both act upon the muscles, and both are followed 
by sensations, and both may become imperial on ac- 
count of unvarying sequence. Now what is the con- 
clusion ? Why that perception, raising the blush in one 
case, may raise the motion in the other ; that both act 
upon the muscles. If mere shame may move in that, 
why not desire in this ? Volition is mixed up with the 
sense, as indeed shame is. To a palsied man it alters 
with the disease. In its muscular province it runs into 
its results; and the nisus and the sequence which are 



Chap. XXXII.] Muscular Volition, 67 

mere sensational perceptions ; which are not part of 
the will, but helpless consequences, — have need to be 
dissected out of it before we can arrive at the anterior 
phenomenon as it is to be seen in the current. 

So, what is Muscular Volition? 

First, it is Perception of that complex sort which 
we shall explain (see Ethics, Introd. Chap. III.) under 
the name of Desire. But let me be understood. A 
desire to move my arm would be too gross a statement. 
A desire to move my arm would be too consciously 
vague to be the truth in Muscular Volition. From 
childhood up I have learned the movements of the 
arm. From random scuffles in my mother's lap I have 
learned what I can do, and what are the sensations in 
doing it, like a girl strumming her guitar. 

Through facts of causality which I am to explain in 
our ontological discussion I reach perceptions of cause 
and a trust to analogical recurrences. My arm, there- 
fore, is too gross a statement. I have learned each 
muscle of my arm ; not anatomically, but in its prac- 
tical capacities. My desire, therefore, is for the recur- 
rence of a specific well understood motion. 

Now along with this, I have, in the second place, 
instantaneous with the wish, a perception that it will 
be gratified, founded, as we shall afterwards explain, 
upon uniform experience. 

Instantaneous with this, thirdly, I have sensation : 
the charm actually operates : 

Characteristic of this sensation, fourthly, the nisus, 
which belongs to no other form. It wearies and 
struggles and exhausts like no other emotion of sense. 
And being simultaneous with the desire, I feel my way 
along it, and shape it, and alter it, by the experiences 
of my perceptive volitions. ' 



68 Psychology. [Book I. 

Now I do not say there is no difficulty in all this. 
There is a puzzle as to how a man can march when he 
is not awake. There is a puzzle as to how the lungs 
can move sometimes when we desire, and sometimes 
when we have no desire in the matter. There is a 
puzzle as to how the fingers move with the velocity of 
thought over the key-board of an instrument. But it 
only convinces me more that it is by the velocity of 
thought ; that the girl beating on the keys is as quick 
as her perceptive consciousness ; that at each touch 
there is perception and emotion ; and that the com- 
plexity of the facts is less difficult in our scheme than 
in any other. 

Add now to all this, that the best philosophers have 
always spoken confusedly on the subject of the Will ; 
that Hamilton calls it * that " complex phenomenon of 
Will and Desire " : that he has claimed to fix the 
succinct division, into Cognition, Emotion, and Cona- 
tion ; and then called the last, Will and Desire ; Desire 
unquestionably being quite inseparable from Emotion ; 
and then that all men and all languages mix Will and 
Wish indistinguishably and by the very necessities of 
spoken thought constantly together; moreover that 
the other province of Volition, viz., Attention, is about 
to be proved to be nothing more than an instance 
under the Law of the Strongest Emotion, — and I think 
that the first improbabilities of our scheme ought not 
unduly to depress it, and that there is a higher im- 
probability by far (if we accomplish that last mentioned 
generalization) in the idea of a primal faculty of the 
mind, if the sole work that calls for it is the moving 
of the flexors of the body. 

* Lectures, p. 127. 



Chap. XXXIV.] The Only Volition not Muscular. 69 

Let us proceed, therefore, to that last mentioned 
generalization, viz., as to Will in its other province. 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

ATTENTION. 

Attention is Perception held in the mind by an 
act of Will. 

The perception may be of any kind ; of sense ; of 
memory; of self; of not-self ; of past ; of present; it 
matters not what ; if it pleases us ; or if it does not 
please us ; and on any account it pleases us to have it 
or to detain it in the current ; then by an act of Voli- 
tion we transmute a common perception into an act 
of Attention. There is nothing consciously present, 
therefore, except perceptions, unless Will can be 
demonstrated to be a separate faculty. 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

ATTENTION THE ONLY PROVINCE OF VOLITION NOT MUSCULAR. 

I SIT down to my desk to write a sermon. In the 
course of that sermon I exert all the powers of the 
Will, I think any one will admit, of which I am capable. 

Eliminate now all the muscular struggles, the 
twitching of my hair, the moving on my seat, the fix- 
ing of my eye, and the muscular power to cast out a 
thought by distracting myself by some voluntary strain. 
Leave out of course all that is muscular in writing : 
and so let us take up those grander classes of intellect- 
ual acts that are concerned in the production of the 
sermon. Let us take up memory for example. What 
is therein memory, as a voluntary struggle, other than 



yo Psychology. [book I. 

the fixing of the Attention ? Consciously think of it ! 
I want to recollect the word Mesopotamia, for I seem 
entirely to have forgotten it. Not so entirely, you will 
observe, that I have not something present in my percep- 
tion that makes me know something about it, enough to 
desire it. Now what do I consciously do ? I cannot 
command the absent syllables. I cannot say, ' Come,' 
by a direct act of imperial volition. I sit biting my pen 
and ATTENDING to the perceptions I have. I reach, 
perhaps, a part of the word — " Meso ! " " Meso ! " and 
I repeat it, or attend to it in thought. By the law of 
association I have experience that it will bring the resi- 
due. But I cannot command the residue. I can simply 
attend to the perceptions already possessed. And so 
in all the forms of elaboration, fancy, judgment, com- 
parison ; in all the acts of the mind ; which, like the 
memory, we are yet in this book to reduce to the phe- 
nomenon of Perception ; as respects the present point, 
we can see enough at once to admit that the sermon 
gets on by the mere exercise of Attention. I have a 
present thought. Its tendency is to suggest in order. 
As long as the order lasts I just gaze at it, and write 
it down. By the law of the Stronger Emotion the 
mind thinks to please me, and travels on for a page, 
perhaps, of just the associations. If they stop, I stop. 
If impertinent lines begin, I stop the machinery, like 
a mill operative who has broken a thread. I refuse to 
attend to one thing. I insist by attention upon another. 
I wait for that to start anew. I cannot order it to 
start anew. I cannot command an absent thought. 
But by the beautiful law of the strongest, and by the 
single act of Attention, I have experienced former suc- 
cess ; and I confidently trust that the train will weave 
on to the close. 



Chap. XXXV.] Attention no Separate Faculty. 71 

Now think of all the struggles of the will ; on a 
battle-field ; in the utmost storm of work ; and think 
if I can do anything but attend and wait. I can bran- 
dish my sword, and rush upon the guns, and shout to 
my captains in the field, but can I do anything in 
thought but perceive what I perceive, and if I wish 
to perceive anything outside of that, attend to some- 
thing I already perceive, and expect that to suggest 
to me the perceptions that are absent from my con- 
sciousness ? 

All this will be plainer when we come to speak of 
Memory ; and will grow plainer afterward by our doc- 
trines of Sensation ; but the only way to establish 
metaphysical truth is through consciousness, and we 
appeal to that for any volition that does not move a 
muscle, or else secure a more attentive consciousness. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

WILL IN ITS SECOND PROVINCE NO SEPARATE ACT AT ALL; ATTEN- 
TION ENTIRELY ACCOUNTED FOR BY THE LAW OF THE STRONG- 
EST EMOTION. 

Having proved the Will to be concerned in mov- 
ing the muscles, and in nothing else besides except 
the phenomenon of Attention, we mean to lower it in 
its claim altogether, and show that the phenomenon 
of Attention is itself an instance under the Law of the 
Strongest Emotion. 

Not, let me explain, that we are to hold that the 
word Will is without a meaning ; nor that we are to 
cast it out from its place, or to deny it our thought as 
a correct and critical reality ; but that we are to re- 
nounce it as an original act. It moves the muscles, 
and it spurs us to attend. So doing, it shakes the 



72 Psychology. [Book I. 

earth, and it scales the heavens. Nor can we exagger- 
ate the measure of accountability to which it will be 
held. And yet it has but two provinces, — certain 
tissues of our body, and the movement to attend. 
And not only is it solely Perception, but, in the latter 
instance, Perception pure, the fact that we attend being 
only a case under the Law of the Strongest Emotion. 

To prove this, — what was that law? That, out of the 
two storehouses of Sensation and Recurrence, the next 
thought that would consciously emerge would be the 
one that could produce the strongest emotion. If a 
rocket-stick fell, and should tumble at our feet, then 
that might wake us most, and would irrupt into our 
consciousness. Then the boy that fired it. So the 
thread would spin, each last striking thought marrying 
itself to the next, and picking from the stuff of Sensa- 
tion and Recurrence the most shining woof for the 
fabric of our continued thinking. 

Now perceptions give place as the stronger ones 
move up. Why ? Because perceptions fade. But 
suppose we can prevent their fading. Why will that 
be ? Because they are precious. W r hat will that 
mean? Simply that they have not faded. For some 
Cause they continue to interest us ; and apart from 
some muscular motions by which we can throw out 
what disturbs, Ave keep to a line of thought by a 
superior wish ; and what is that but the law of the 
strongest emotion? 

We will to attend. What is that but a will for the 
present thought ? We feel a need that it should stay. 
By experience it can. Experimentally it does. And 
that begets the imperial sense. We decide, or we 
elect, or we determine, that it shall ; and, as in the 
instance of the muscles, we know that it will have to. 



Chap, xxxvi.] All Volition Perception. 73 

It is proper, therefore, (though we must not antici- 
pate Ethics), that a man should be responsible for his 
wish as well as for his Volition ; one is but an instance 
of the other : that he should he responsible for his 
perceiving as well as for his feeling, since both are 
but an aspect of the same : and that Volition, merely 
moving the muscle or merely enabling us to attend, 
should not be set down as all our account, since the 
thoughts and affections of the soul are alike phenom- 
enally responsible. 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

ALL VOLITION PERCEPTION. 

We are better prepared now to understand exactly 
what Volition is. We were able to say in the instance 
of Consciousness, — All Consciousness is Perception, 
and all Perception Consciousness. In the instance of 
Volition we are able to say only one of these. We 
can say, All Volition is Perception ; but we cannot say, 
All Perception is Volition. Volition is the shape only 
of a few perceptions. 

We have been able to show that Volition occurs 
simply in two provinces, the one the moving of the 
muscles, and the other the phenomenon of Attention. 
These, obviously, are very different. Will when I 
move my arm, and Will when I hold a perception, are 
so thoroughly distinct, that this alone ought to destroy 
their primordial character. And it will be very helpful 
to our consciousness to show where they agree ; to 
show where they differ ; to show how complex they 
are; to show that they are emotional and cognitive ; to 
show what the complexity is ; and to show that the com- 
plexity consists in perceptions emotional and cognitive 
heaped up and interblended the one upon the other. 
4 



74 Psychology. [book I. 

I have a perception, and I desire to keep it. That 
desire keeps it. Interpenetrated into that desire is an 
experience that it will be kept. That experience, as 
will be hereafter shown, is itself perceptive, and it lends 
to the desire an imperial or authoritative character. 
So much for Attention. 

Now I have a muscle that I have moved from child- 
hood ; at first vagrantly (till I grew cognizant about it), 
like an infant fighting the air, the phenomena being (i) 
a desire to move it, (2) an experience that it will move, 
(3) a perception that it does, (4) a conscious sensational 
strain or stress, and (5) an imperial sense of control or 
authority in the matter. Now the first is a Perception, 
as we show when treating of Desire. The second is 
Perception, as we shall show when treating of Experi- 
ence. The third is Perception pro forma, and as is 
above announced. The fourth is Perception, for it is 
only Sensation. And the fifth is a Perceptive confi- 
dence, made up of all the Perceptions combined, and 
giving assurance of the successful act. 

Further; of the two acts, Musculation and Atten- 
tion, there is absent from Attention the nisus, or in- 
stantaneous attempt, and all bodily sensation.* But 
there is present, the desire, and the choice (that is, the 
immediate imperial expectation), and then the imme- 
diate sequence instantaneous with the desire itself, not 
so clean-cut in the instance of Attention as in the 
instance of Muscular Motion, yet showing such pow- 
erful analogy, and connected, the bodily and the men- 
tal, so much in human accountability, as to show why 
these two things, Muscular Motion and the Act of 
Attention, determined by like sets of conscious emo- 

* Except, indeed, certain incidental strains of certain muscles of the 
body, particularly of the eye, when we attempt mentally to attend. 



Chap. XXXVII.] Perception as Recurring. 75 

tional perceptions, have set apart such perceptions, 
and labelled them Volitions. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. 

LAW V : — PERCEPTION AS RECURRING. 

Having considered Perception as Incessant, Per- 
ception as Associated by the Law of the Strongest 
Emotion, Perception as Fading, Perception as Affect- 
ing the Body, I come to the Fifth great law of Con- 
scious Perception, Perception as Recurring. 

And this demands the very simplest enunciation. 
Being inexplicable, and utterly original, to try to give 
it a name even in semblance expressing a cause, would 
disguise the reality. Perception recurs. That is the 
whole of it. 

To say that it is retained, and to call the power 
Retention ; to say that it is impressed, and to call the 
power a power to receive impressions which endure 
in the mind ; to call it Memory (a good word in its 
proper place, but) as a faculty directly to cognize passed 
events, — is all to cloud our Metaphysics with an 
imagined explanation, or at least the guise of one ; when 
all the fact that comes up into our consciousness is 
that perceptions come back again. Why, — no mortal 
will ever discover : and it is unscientific to take any- 
thing but the fact. By a law of Nature, the kindness 
of which is all that can be established, a perception, 
once had, may or may not come back again. There 
can be probabilities found out; as, for example, where 
the thought has been deep and pungent, where it has 
been held fast to by an act of the Will, that is, in con- 
scious Attention. But experience discovered this. The 
naked phenomenon apart is, that Perception, when it 



/6 Psychology. [Book I. 

has once occurred, recurs, and that without the sound 
and without the sight and without the scent that origi- 
nally engendered it. 

This makes the shoal of possible perceptions that 
the Law of the Strongest Emotion does so eternally 
fish up. 

Let not the fact that perceptions differ as they re- 
cur, suggest that there must be a power of Fancy that 
new combines the material before their advent. The 
law of association, i. e. the Law of the Strongest Emo- 
tion, is that flashing and immediate influence. Let but 
the selvage of an old thought come up, it rushes into 
new arrangement ; that is, it calls up a set to meet it. 
The mind does have new pictures that it never had 
before. But why ? Grant but two things, the power to 
recur and the power to suggest each other, and per- 
ceptions will be varied endlessly. Each smallest one, 
having the power to come back, will choose its fellows; 
and the result will be a mental kaleidoscope. The law 
of association will choose the one by which we will be 
most entertained, and the result will be endless com- 
binations of thought out of the old material. 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

LAW VI : — PERCEPTION AS CONTINUOUS. 

I MUST interpose at once some account of the last 
law of Perception, viz. that it is Continuous. It would 
have been easy to omit this, it is so unobtrusive. And 
yet it would have been convenient to have had it ear- 
lier. But I postponed it ; not that I did not feel the 
want of it in treating of Association, but because it 
would delay the thought. In expounding Memory, 
it becomes altogether vital ; and therefore, as it must 



Chap. XXXVIII.] Perception as Continuous. 77 

be somewhere interposed, we will let it come in in the 
very happiest place. Like the long staple of which the 
manufacturers speak, the law of continuance, like the 
long fibre of cotton, helps to strengthen the thread 
which (granting the Law of Recurrence) connects the 
present with the past in the phenomenon of Memory. 

The law of Perception as Continuous is, that, as a 
primordial fact, Perception continues a little, -and does 
not flash upon the mind and die with no conscious du- 
ration. It melts slowly like a glow-worm in its gleam. 
Sensation corresponds in this. The eye is inert in 
seeing. It sees on after a vanished vision. 

So of the ear. A note of music does not die 
instantly. 

So of the smell. There is a lingering on the sense. 

If I take a brand and twirl it, it will make a ring 
of light, showing that the light and the coal do not 
get out of the way together. 

Now all of this is not physical ; it is partly in the 
mind. The mind takes some time to think.' And 
without attention, and without anything to breed de- 
lay, thought does not flash in an absolute instant, but 
glides in a conscious period ; and this fact, like the 
thread in wool, helps to spin thought, and carry on a 
train. It gives edge to connect pictures. It gives the 
waiting moment necessary to get the next association. 
And, therefore, I said it would have been convenient 
to be known at the time when we were speaking of 
the progress of an orderly suggestion. 

Perception as Continuous, therefore, is the law by 
which Perception as Fading takes an instant to fade, 
that it may join itself in the current to others. 



?8 Psychology. [Book I. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 



WHEN I look at a distant house, I see a red brick, 
or a white painted, surface, and if any one should say 
I had a primordial faculty by which I cognized that 
house as distant, and just so distant, he would con- 
tradict consciousness, and all the later metaphysical 
teachings. I cognize the color as a sheer sensation. 
But the out-ness of that color, and the length of that 
out-ness, is the accretion of many perceptions. I learn 
it as we shall hereafter see. And now, when I behold 
a house, perceptions in an associated order flash along 
the intervening landscape. My eye has been bred a 
land measurer. Experience teaches me the distance. 
And more than that, certain deepness of the hue, and 
certain focus of the eye itself, and certain thousand 
other things, aggregate as tests, and make the decision 
facile and perfectly immediate. 

Now precisely this, MUTA TIS MUTANDIS, is 
THE PHENOMENON OF MEMORY. For the brick house I 
have nothing but the instrument of Sensation. For the 
past event I have nothing but the instrument of Recur- 
rence. Sensation announces the brick house, and a 
glance over the intervening space, and those other 
things', announce it as distant. Recurrence brings back 
an ancient thought, and a glance over the intervening 
time, and certain other things, announce it as past. 

That is, a thought comes up by the law of bare 
Recurrence, which we have described as primordial. It 
comes with no label on its back, and we have no power 
such as everybody has been imagining, to cognize it as 
past. But the very law of Association that brought it 



Chap. XXXIX.] Memory. 79 

up, has already probably connected it. That is, the 
oat-field and the wheat-field and the grass lawn, by 
which we give distance to the house, serve no other 
purpose in the matter of space than intervening events 
do in the matter of time. Nay, time has two advan- 
tages. Time can borrow also a measure by space. I 
see a house ; this time not actually, but as a matter of 
Recurrence. I see it is my neighbor's house, in ten 
thousand ways. The intervening fields show it ; meas- 
uring the distance of it, as though by sensation, right 
up to my door. The familiar face of it ; its connection 
with all my life ; its thousand tracks of associated 
thought, — all fix it in an instant. And just as the 
hue of a building, or the focus of my eye, are those 
"other things" of which I spoke a moment ago, so 
there are lesser things that attend Recurrence, like 
the deepness of the print or the familiarity of the 
look of an idea, by which we learn by experience * 
that it is remembered, i. e. that it has been in the 
mind before. 

The dogma, therefore, that Memory is a primordial 
power by which the mind directly cognizes the past ; 
or as Sir William Hamilton describes it,f " a knowledge 
of a present thought, involving an absolute belief that 
this thought represents another act of knowledge that 
has been," — all theories of the past as directly known 
as the past by one act of original intelligence, are de 
trop, and, therefore, fanciful. The whole can be ex- 
plained far short of that. And this analysis of Mem- 
ory which makes it perfectly on a par with Sensation 
as applied to distance, is a wonderful philosophical 

* The teachings of experience will be analyzed when we come to the 
Book on Logic. 

\ Wight's Phil, of Sir W. H., p. 178. 



80 Psychology. [Book I. 

relief, because it removes the bar that has stood in the 
way of many a metaphysical elucidation.* 

There is a law then that perceptions, once possessed, 
come back again. The law is naked and perfectly 
inexplicable in any other way than that it is a good 
law, and highly consistent with the goodness of our 
original Creator. They come back unmarked and un- 
discriminated and undistinguishable from others, except 
intrinsically, that is, as fainter and other than percep- 
tions of direct sensation. This power to recur is a 
store-house in an inexplicable way like Sensation. I 
say like Sensation ; for thought may be liable to recur 
and never do it, just as light may beam upon the eye, 
and sounds pelt upon the ear, and scents bathe the 
nostril, and be store-houses of sense ; and never sensa- 
tion. Consciously we do not see or hear. Consciously 
we dp not remember. We see some things. And we 
bring back some things from the store-house of the 
past; but infinitesimally few things in contrast with 
the enormous crowd that are ready to come into our 
consciousness. 

Suggestion, indefatigably busy ; — or rather, to 
speak in more measured terms, Perception, by its law 
of the Stronger Emotion, is emerging into conscious- 
ness from either store of our unconscious perceptibilities. 
It picks its thread from either distaff; and now a house, 
and now a past event, and now an abstract fragment, is 
drawn into the staple of the thread, leaving the myriads 
that are beating on the sense just as distant as the 
throng that is clamoring for Recurrence. Let it seize 
a house, Suggestion immediately places it in space by 
a flash over the field of vision ; or is it a past event, 

* See Mill's difficulty which he gives up as insoluble. (Exam, of 
Sir Wm. Hamilton, vol. i, p. 262.) 



Chap. XL.] Recollection. 8 1 

Suggestion immediately flashes over the past till it 
places it in time. Memory is nothing but this. And 
a recurrent thought would have to stand out in the 
cold, for any power we have to cognize it as of the past, 
unless it can rouse some other thoughts and bridge 
over the space and know itself by intervening histories. 
Of course the whole contents of consciousness 
recur. The very idea of thought as past, by whatso- 
ever way I get it, may then after that recur. And 
thus in w T ays hereafter to be more fully sketched when 
I come to speak of Intuitive Belief, pastness may be 
learned just like distance, but, when once learned, may 
recur along with the thought, and may be at once con- 
cluded on as a part of its recurrence. 

CHAPTER XL. 

RECOLLECTION. 

MEMORY being only the power by which a recur- 
rent thought is recognized as past by its simple asso- 
ciations, and having no other claim to be a simple 
power than that which reveals to us distance in the 
instance of sensation, Recollection is nothing more than 
Memory with the Will annexed. 

Experiencing the law of Suggestion as recalling 
thought, I use the Will in it. Recurrence is the mere 
emerging. Memory is the recognition of the emergent 
thought by quick associations with the rest that give 
it its place in history. Recollection is an effort in all 
this, that is, the use of the Will in its second province 
of Attention, I mean attention to something already 
perceived, and I mean in order that that perceived 
something may suggest a thought, a thought of which 
we know enough already to know that there is such a 
4* ' 



82 Psychology. [Book I. 

thought, and then further than that that it is a 
thought waiting for recurrence. 



CHAPTER XLI. 

IMAGINATION. 

No separate Fancy, therefore, is required. The 
Law of the Strongest Emotion makes pictures to please 
us. It uses the store-houses of the present and the 
past. Out of the past it is really Memory. For 
though we may paint a goblin, and can hardly say we 
ever remember one, yet the material is out of the store- 
house of the past, and the grouping is by the stronger 
emotion. The picture I form of Windsor Castle, when 
I stand and look at it, and the picture I form of the 
town of Man-Soul, when Bunyan speaks of it, are both 
by the Law of Association. Sensation furnishes me 
for one, and Memory furnishes me for the other. I 
pick out the " Castle," and I pick out the " Town," and I 
discard other things. I pick out the Castle and leave 
the rest of Sense, and I pick out the Town from all the 
other Recurrences ; and though the Castle is made 
ready to my sight, so the Town is by the same flash 
of the Strongest Emotion that seizes upon the one just 
as it throws together the pieces of the other. 

Imagination therefore is that grouping of percep- 
tions which the mind got by Recurrence, and which the 
mind selects by the Law of the Strongest Emotion. 

CHAPTER XLII. 

ANALYSIS. 

I HAVE said (Chapter XV.) that there are no Simple 
Ideas ; that is, Perception cannot be made so unitary 



Chap. XLIV.] Other Instances of Perception. 83 

that more truths than one must not of necessity be 
in it. 

Dividing a perception, however, and distinguishing 
as far as possible its conceivable elements, is the work 
of Analysis. 

CHAPTER XLIII. 

ABSTRACTION. 

Abstraction takes these elements, and looks at 
them separately. 

I analyze a sunbeam. I note its course and its 
color — its heat and its continuance — its light and its 
actinic influences. I abstract any one of these. Con- 
sciousness, emotion, and cognition are abstractions from 
any one perception. Nevertheless nothing is unitary. 
All stay mixed ; though we think we abstract them. 
A course or a color or a time gives us more to think of 
than can be absolutely single. Consciousness grasps 
back at both its sisters. Analysis is a mere bungle : 
Abstraction never perfect ; and the names and of 
course the definitions (see Chap. XVII.) which it is 
the office of Abstraction to bestow, a mere hint at a 
real difference. 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

JUDGMENT, COMPARISON, DEDUCTION, REASON. 

We mention these simply to glance at them. These 
are not different faculties. Each is the mind in its 
power to perceive. Each is the whole mind with 
names used as for mental convenience. They differ as 
perceptions differ. And they may be multiplied to 
any extent, the vocabulary of perceiving having all the 
room that perceptions have of being multiplied in the 
mind. 



BOOK II. 

LOGIC; 

OR, THE 

SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS KNOWLEDGE. 



CHAPTER I. 

KNOWLEDGE. 



A VERY subtle philological question might be 
allowed to hinder us at the very opening of this dis- 
cussion. 

A simple statement would be, that Knowledge is of 
two kinds, Conscious and Unconscious. By Conscious 
Knowledge I would understand that which a man has 
at the time, as when I say, ' I know that I have a sen- 
sation of pain,' or ' I know that light is beautiful, for I 
am looking at it at this very moment.' Unconscious 
Knowledge would be the Knowledge of Greek or 
Latin, — Potential Knowledge, or the power to know 
when the opportunity offers, as, for example, when I 
say, ' Such a man knows Logic, or the whole circle of 
the Sciences.' 

Now the question to which I allude is, whether 
this last is not the only proper sense; whether power 
to perceive is not the universal sense of the word 
Knowledge. We are not willing to make the least 
pause about it. Metaphysically it makes no difference. 



86 Logic. [Book II. 

To make clear the statements, we will adopt the 
twofold distinction. Conscious Knowledge is some- 
thing cognized at the time ; and Unconscious Knowl- 
edge something I could cognize if the occasion should 
occur. Let it be distinctly observed that any difficul- 
ties of all this are simply difficulties of Philology. 



CHAPTER II. 

CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE. 

CONSCIOUS Knowledge will be found to be of two 
kinds, Intuitive and Empirical. 

CHAPTER III. 

INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE. 

THE three aspects of Perception were Conscious- 
ness, Emotion, and Cognition. The wonder might be 
felt that we did not employ these three as the sub- 
jects of Divisions. Psychology might have been the 
Science of Consciousness. We might have called Logic 
the Science of Cognition : and Pathics the Science of 
Emotion. There might have been some advantages 
of this. But there were disadvantages that we need 
not stop to mention. Yet simplicity will be achieved 
by saying now that Cognition is nothing more or less 
than Intuitive Knowledge. All that we said of it will 
apply to the subject of the present chapter. All Per- 
ception was Cognition, and all Cognition was Percep- 
tion, and what is more important far, Cognition is 
nothing more than Consciousness. Therefore our defi- 
nition in this place can be very distinct. I intuitively 
know nothing but the contents of my consciousness. 



Chap. III.] Intuitive Knowledge. 87 

To show that I distinctly appreciate what I say, 
I mean that Intuitive Knowledge does not cognize 
self unless self as an object of knowledge is itself a 
consciousness. Please understand me literally. I 
mean to show hereafter that self is partly conscious- 
ness, as I mean to show by that, that that is the rea- 
son that we speak always of being conscious of self. 
I mean to show that it is an affair of language. 
Self as a mere thing of dictionaries, for reasons that 
might be stated, includes the passing consciousness 
that is with us at the time. When I speak of self I 
mean an ens and its consciousnesses. This is an acci- 
dent of language — not an accident either as being de- 
void of sense. What I know intuitively is only con- 
sciousness. If consciousness were counted as the act," 
and self were kept out of view as only the agent, it 
would not be true that there were intuitions of self. 
This is mere vocabulary. We wish thus early to make a 
point of that. We mention it out of place ; for On- 
tology is that which will introduce us to self. But we 
mention it to allay distrust. It might be thought con- 
temptuously that we were not contemplating results. 
It will make our meaning plainer as to Intuitive 
Knowledge. We have no Intuitive Knowledge of self, 
if only self is considered as meaning what thinkers 
have universally imagined it to mean, viz. an inward 
entity. Of that we have naught intuitive. Self in its 
working sense, that is as the word can be seen con- 
sciously to be framed, includes the present conscious- 
ness ; and qua that consciousness we are conscious of 
it, and that is all the way we are conscious of self. 

So of not-self. We are conscious of it ; but only 
because qualities have gone into it. As mere lexicon- 
work, matter includes blackness, — includes hardness, — 



88 Logic. [Book II. 

includes anything we see that we are conscious of as 
of it. Not Metaphysics now, but mere Dictionary, 
— very important in Metaphysics, because it uncum- 
bers a difficult subject, yet not in se, but only as words 
go in usu, declares that not-self includes conscious- 
ness, because the pink and yellow of the peach go into 
the fruit, and my Intuitive Knowledge seizes the 
peach, but only as including these conscious seeings. 
So much to allay impatience. When Ontology is in 
turn, it will be seen that Intuitive Knowledge is sheerly 
Consciousness. 

Nay I may go a good deal further. When I say 
I am conscious of the peach, I do not mean I am con- 
scious of the peach through its qualities. I mean nothing 
of the kind. There is no-such consciousness. I mean I 
am conscious of consciousness, and the dictionary puts 
consciousness inside of the peach. I have property 
inside the word, and merely go for it. Let the pink, 
which I consciously see, be kept ou.t of the fruit, and 
the strictly constructed entity, viz. the atoms that have 
the hue, or the force that projects it to the sense, I am 
not conscious of. Intuitive Knowledge is simply of 
the contents of Consciousness. 

CHAPTER IV. 

GROUND OF INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE. 

If Intuitive Knowledge be Consciousness, i. e. the 
intelligence that each perception has of itself, the 
ground of the Knowledge is nothing more than the 
perception. The ground of any certainty is the reason 
that we have for its belief. As all that we believe in 
Intuitive Knowledge is that we have a perception, it is 
idle to battle the watch about the truth of conscious- 



Chap. VI.] Extent of Intuitive Knowledge. 89 

ness, or the goodness of God in not imposing a deceit, 
as the ground we look for is found in the very proposi- 
tion. If we have a perception, that is all we mean by 
Intuitive Knowledge. 

CHAPTER V. 

DEGREE OF INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE. 

The degr % ee of Intuitive Knowledge is as complete 
as the fact of the perception. The degree of Empiri- 
cal Knowledge is not complete. It is never absolute. 
Intuitive Knowledge, as will appear in the sequel, is 
the only absolute certainty possessed by man. 



CHAPTER VI. 

EXTENT OF INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE. 

KEEPING it well in our memory that we are now 
speaking of Conscious Knowledge, or Knowledge at 
the moment in the mind, the extent of Intuitive Knowl- 
edge can be seen to be nothing more than the extent 
of the perception, that is the extent of absolute con- 
sciousness possessed by any beholder at the time. As 
Perception is never simple, and sometimes very varied, 
and always entire, I mean by that an entire perception 
of everything present in the vision ; as, for example, I 
perceive light, and I perceive flavor and scent and 
sound and other things often all in one consciousness ; 
though the perception be but a fleeting gleam and 
is always passing to the next, yet while it lingers, it has 
a manifest extent, and that extent is all the points and 
hues and sounds and angles, and emotional enjoy- 
ments, and immediate associations, and I may add, 



90 Logic. [Book II. 

uncertainties, that are present in that one perception 
of the mind. 



CHAPTER VII. 

INFLUENCE ON INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAWS OF PERCEPTION. 

The influence on Intuitive Knowledge of the Law 
of Perception as Incessant is of course this much, that 
it makes it embrace in time a vast multiplicity of 
objects ; but except for other laws which are con- 
cerned in weaving these objects together, each separate 
perceptive gleam would have little gained by it. Per- 
ception as Fading, Perception as Transient, Percep- 
tion as Continuous, almost all the laws, unless all com- 
bined and perfected by the later ones that we men- 
tioned in the list, would leave perceptions each stand- 
ing by itself; and though they would be varied endlessly, 
yet Intuitive Knowledge being only the present per- 
ception, each one would be unconscious of all the 
others, and a man's intuitions would be a set of fire-fly 
gleams, just melting out in the night, not spreading 
into thought, and not rising into anything like practical 
intelligence. 

But now, take all these former laws, and add to 
them the Law of Recurrence, and the Law of the 
Strongest Emotion, and there occurs Memory ; and 
Memory we have seen to be the recurring of some- 
thing in the past, and then the recurring by the law 
of association of enough of intervening things to serve 
as a bridge. I see a cottage on the plain, and enough 
all around it and between, in the same flash almost, to 
show me its position. I have a perception from the 
past, and enough all around it of other perceptions that 
it immediately suggests to bridge over all that inter- 



Chap. VII.] Effect of the Lazvs of Perception. 91 

venes. I see the thought mapped. And so my per- 
ceptions, though only conscious of my perceivings at 
the time, and only intuitively knowing my present con- 
sciousness, yet are so bred by my beneficent Creator 
that they come up in maps or connected pictures. They 
have something of the present, and something of the 
past ; something of the near, and something of the dis- 
tant ; and these in every picture ; so that recurrent 
past suggests the present, and the intruding present 
suggests the past. And thus my Intuitive Knowledge, 
though a mere perception, is nevertheless a conscious 
sight of a suggested chain that may link together the 
past and the present. 

We shall see, when we come to the third Book, more 
of this effect of these laws upon our knowledge. We 
shall see how Sensation unites with them, and how 
Self and Not-Self both emerge to their full proportions. 
We shall show how Being, in all its idea, is built up by 
the help of these laws of the mind. 

For the present, let us confine ourselves to a dis- 
tinct progression. Knowledge is either Actual or 
Potential (Conscious or Unconscious). Actual Knowl- 
edge may be divided into Intuitive and Empirical. 
Intuitive, which we are now considering, is simply our 
knowledge of our own Perceptions. More distinctly, 
it is only the perception we are having at a time. Its 
Ground is that perception itself. Its Degree is abso- 
lute, for it asserts nothing but the perception. Its 
Extent is the extent of the perception. And what 
redeems it from a mere fire-fly gleam hither and 
thither idly in the night, is the law of the perception 
itself, as continuous enough and complex enough and 
then associated enough to make it move in connected 
pictures, and give conscious information of itself by 
Recurrence and by connection at the time. 



92 Logic. [Book II. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 



We have seen how Intuitive Knowledge confines 
itself to immediate Consciousness. We wish to show 
how it can grow into Experience, or how it can arrive 
at anything else except that I am perceiving at the 
time. 

In the town where I live is a chime of bells. Sup- 
pose I have a perception of one stroke of one bell. 
Suppose I have the same perception in five minutes 
again. Suppose I have the same perception in five 
minutes more. Suppose I have the same perception 
each five minutes all my life. I know that five min- 
utes from the present stroke it will strike again : and 
in five minutes again. What is the ground of my 
knowledge ? Simply Experience. What is the ground 
of my belief in Experience ? Some say, A native prin- 
ciple. But let us examine that. What do I mean by 
my belief in Experience? Simply that what has always 
happened will happen again. Now suppose it does 
not happen again. Will it violate any native princi- 
ple ? Will it not only violate experience ? We throw 
up our hands and say, We never knew the like before. 
The law is in the bell then, and not in the mind. It 
is a fact about the bell. We express it in the very 
usages of speech when we throw it into the form of a 
characteristic. ' It rings ' (as a discovered experience 
of the bell, or a simple thing that we have perceived). 
' It rings as the habit of its history once in five minutes.' 
Now THAT IS A TYPE OF ALL THAT WE KNOW 
ABOUT THE UNIVERSE EXCEPT THIS MOMENT'S CON- 
SCIOUSNESS. This latter little gleam is my Intuitive 



Chai>. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge, 93 

Knowledge. All beyond is but an endless repetition 
of the case of the bell, and is my Empirical Knowledge. 
But let us look at this more closely. 



CHAPTER IX. 

GROUND OF EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 

We have seen that Intuitive Knowledge, or Con- 
sciousness, is cognitive in the respect of its extent of 
all the phenomena that are present in the immediate 
perception. If it is blue color that I perceive, I per- 
ceive its shade and any variety of its tint in one part 
of its surface or another. I perceive its surface and 
any angle that it makes ; and if it borders a purple or 
a scarlet, I observe that. If it moves, I observe that. 
If it fades, that also I notice. The extent of my In- 
tuitive Knowledge, let me insist, reaches all that 
appears. Now if a bell has sounded for twenty years, 
does not that appear ? You may say, Not consciously ; 
not as a matter of perception at any one time ; and 
that clears the question, and brings it to a point of 
vivid elucidation just as I desire. I am not conscious 
that it has always rung, and, therefore, it is not a mat- 
ter of Intuitive Knowledge. But I am conscious that 
it now rings ; and five minutes afterward I am con- 
scious that it rings again. And while I am conscious 
of its ringing again, I am conscious of the recurrent 
perception of its ringing the last time. And I am con- 
scious of a row of such perceptions recurring like city 
gas-lights, fading back into the past. These things I 
intuitively know, for I actually perceive them. Now 
that the bell did ring in the past, or will ring in the 
future, is not intuitive. Yet I hold that, though it is 
not intuitive, simply because we are hot immediately 



94 Logic. [Book II. 

conscious of what is either past or future, yet that it 
is known without an independent faculty, and as a 
thing revealed in the Conscious Perception. 

As this is difficult we will go to work with great 
method and in the following order : — 

I. I will state, first, three examples of Empirical 
Knowledge. 

II. I will make, second, a distinct affirmation of 
their empirical ground. 

III. I will state, third, certain peculiar difficulties. 

IV. I will state, fourth, how they are to be obvi- 
ated ; and 

V. I will state, fifth, the single form to which all our 
Empirical Knowledge is to be reduced. 

I. Let us suppose a house and a garden and a lawn 
and a lake and the man whose Intuitive Knowledge 
we are to start with, to be floating on the lake in a 
boat. We wish to present in his instance three forms 
of Empirical Knowledge. 

1. In the first place he lies down in his boat and 
just thinks of the house, or remembers it. That is 
the simplest knowledge of the three. He has an image 
of the house though past. 

2. In the second place he looks off at the house and 
perceives its hue and its distance. That is, he has an 
image of the house as though present. 

3. In the third place, he begins with the lake, and 
raises his eyes by degrees, and predicts as he raises 
his eyes, the lawn, the garden, and the house. This is 
the most complex of all. It is cognizing a house 
though future. 

II. Now my affirmation of each and all of these is 
that they are Empirical. 

The favorite modern affirmation is that they are by 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge. 95 

an independent faculty ; that the first is by Memory, 
and that Memory is a direct cognizing of the past ; 
that the second is by Perception, with the moderns an 
independent faculty over and beyond Sensation (the 
measuring of distance being, as they admit, in part 
Empirical) ; and that the third is by a belief that 
what has been will be, which some men make also in- 
tuitive, and also independent, as an original faculty of 
the mind. 

1. Now my affirmation about the first is that it is a 
case of simple Memory, and that Memory is a recur- 
rence of a past perception with our past convictions 
about it, and such an immediate tracking of itself by 
association with the present, as to show where it is in 
the past. With us the perception only is intuitive, and 
its connection with the past observed, and that by one 
line of experience which is concerned in Memory. 

2. My affirmation about the second is that it is a 
case of simple Memory and of still another fruit of ex- 
perience beside. I have to remember ten thousand 
things before I recognize a house as a house at all ; and 
then, as to the distance, it is a remembrance of dis- 
tances on which I build when I estimate it, and then 
besides this that other experienced fact, that na- 
ture is true to herself in these perceptions before 
the mind. 

The first therefore is simple Memory ; the second 
in fact Memory, but in two particulars : now— 

3. My affirmation about the third is, that it goes 
further and is built upon Memory in three particu- 
lars. 

I am bending my eye upon the lake. I say, When 
I raise it, I will come upon a lawn. Why ? Because I 
remember a lawn : because secondly, I have experience 



g6 . Logic. [Book II. 

of distance, or, in other words, shape and position ; 
because, thirdly, what things have been will be. Or 
in other words I remember continuance in the past, 
and predict it therefore as my coming perception in 
the future. 

My affirmation therefore is, that neither Memory 
when I close my eyes, nor Sensation when I lift them 
up, nor Prediction when I gradually raise them, reveals 
anything either of lawn or house that is not phenom- 
enally perceived, or associated in a traceable remem- 
brance. 

III. I am to state now great difficulties in this 
arranging of a theory. 

I. In the first place, where does the affirmance 
spring from in this account of cognition ? I have a 
recurrence of a house. It instantly associates objects 
up to the very point where I am standing. It also 
associates events. Grant if you please that association 
flashes us a map, where the house that I conceive, and 
the spot where I stand, are drawn in their relative 
locality. Grant more than this, that time has its pic- 
ture, and that the hour when I saw the house recurs 
by its intervening association. Where is the grip of 
actual belief? In other words, where is the affirmance 
of the house as actually of the past ? 

Recollect ; we are shut up to a perception. What 
is not in the consciousness is not in the mind. My 
consciousness comes and is gone. What that does not 
teach is not taught at all. And I have refused to let 
it teach anything but by its own perceivings, and 
declared those perceivings to be annunciatory of 
nothing but themselves, or not in any intuitive way 
of facts or histories outside of what they experience. 

Now grant a picture as perfect as I please. How 



Chap. I X.J Ground of Empirical Knowledge. 97 

can I by mere Recurrence, which just returns me my 
thoughts so, with no mark upon them ; and by mere 
association, which flashes those thoughts into connec- 
tion with the present, affirm anything of those thoughts 
except their mere consciousness? How can I place 
them except in the present picture? How can I know 
so much in what is confessedly a fleeting gleam? 
And how, when I look at a house, or when I predict 
that I can look at one, do I get the grip of knowledge 
from what is confessedly a transitory consciousness? 

2. Again : improvement ; How do I get that ? I 
advance in knowledge. Unless there are original fac- 
ulties that are strengthened and increased, how does 
my consciousness to-day have so much more in it than 
my consciousness earlier in my history ? 

Remember, it will be said, you find all your knowl- 
edge of God and the universe in a passing gleam. 
How does that gleam get full ? And how does this 
mere picture-making that connects, improve the 
thoughts into incalculable amounts of knowledge? 

IV. Now we must recall our minds to the distinc- 
tion of Actual and Potential knowledge, as before 
enunciated. Potential knowledge is that incalculable 
amount just hinted at. 

Actual knowledge is that which is present at the 
time. But as nothing is present at the time of which 
we are not conscious, a man's consciousness at the time 
shuts in all his actual knowledge. So far then, for the 
steadying of the mind, we have something actually 
demonstrated. 

The position, therefore, on the part of those that 
bring forward these very plausible and difficult argu- 
ments must be, that there is more in our consciousness 
than the phenomena we have mentioned, because, first, 
5 



98 Logic. [book II. 

no beauty of association would affirm the past or 
future or the distant present, and because, second, no 
practice in mere tracking by pictures could accrete 
into one consciousness so much as we learn to know 
by one perception of the mind. 

Now these are central difficulties, and deserve a 
most perspicuous answer. 

i. Let me say first: — Convictions themselves are 
conscious, and are matters of memory. 

I have a conviction this moment that there is a 
house beyond me. No matter how I get it, and no 
matter what I mean by it ; that will come after (see 
Ontology). If I attempted to define it and say, as 
I certainly might, that it was a hundred perceptions, 
or rather a circumlocution to include a hundred points 
of consciousness in a sort of algebraic expression (for 
language lives by such things), you would easily entan- 
gle me in debate. But if I say, I know there is a house 
over yonder, you perfectly understand me ; and you 
also understand me when I say, that this conviction is 
itself a subject of recurrence. 

Now with what sort of a grip would the conviction, 
granting I once had it, come back to me ? 

Some may say, It- would come back unrolled from 
its self-affirmation, and with no grip at all. But is that 
certainly so? In fact is it consciously possible ? What 
is it ? It is a conviction. It is a seeing, by indicia I 
have, that there is a house over in the field. Now 
what comes back? You say, a mere picture, or 
the mere idea, of a belief. What do you mean by 
that ? The mere idea of the house ? Then the con- 
viction does not come back at all. Or do you mean 
the mere consciousness of such a conviction ? Well, I 
accept that. Then you admit the mere consciousness 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge. , 99 

of a past conviction, as recurring like everything con- 
scious by a law of the mind. 

But how does it come back? Of course with 
all its circumstances. The house recurs to me, and 
with it the consciousness of my first conviction when 
I saw it, and with that the additional consciousness of 
all that opens afterward. It is the harmony I wish 
to point out. 

2. For, second, convictions being taken for granted 
as originated somewhere (we will not as yet say exactly 
how), they may be exceedingly obscure and feeble, and 
yet grow strong by mere reduplication. I have a con- 
viction there is a house upon the plain : I look and see 
and find that it is the case. There recurs now a whole 
list of phenomenal additions. There recurs the old 
conviction. There recurs the new experiment. There 
recurs the fresh discovery. All these items of con- 
sciousness, recur just as they were perceived. Nay, I 
try again ; and try again. I multiply the experiment. 
The man in the boat looks up ten thousand times. 
The convictions all agree. They all aggregate. And 
this is the history of life. Life is an infinite experi- 
ment, as we shall see when we come to Ontology, in 
which a harmonious Providence confirms our convic- 
tions in ten thousand fashions ; and it is out of these 
harmonious perceivings that we track sensation ; that 
we track it to the senses ; that we track it to the body ; 
that we track it to self; that we track it to a not-self; 
that we track it to God ; for all these are Empirical 
ideas, and all these easily flow if you will accord us 
the possibility of originating the first Empirical con- 
viction. 

3. Now as to that, (viz. how we get the first con- 
viction), when I have a perception, it is cognitive. I 



IOO Logic. [Book II. 

mean by that, it cognizes everything in the present 
perception ; shape, color, everything, as we have said 
repeatedly before. Moreover, this cognition is an 
affirmance. It has every grip that we can imagine. 
That is, it is a conviction that everything is so per- 
ceived. 

If you ask me, Is not this a separate faculty, the 
perception being one thing and the conviction another? 
I answer, Plainly not. The perceiving is a perceiving 
that I perceive, and that as an integral part, or rather 
the whole, of my perception. When it recurs, there- 
fore, the conviction recurs with it, and that for the rea- 
son that the perception itself recurs. 

When it recurs, however, there is quite an explicable 
reduplication. There is the old conviction and the old 
perception. They recur. Now they are the same; 
just as light and color ; yet they are discriminate. 
Perception and emotion are one, yet easily distinguish- 
able. In other words, emotion can be abstracted from 
perception and viewed separately. In like manner 
conviction is an aspect of perception, concretely insep- 
arable from it, in compass commensurate with it, in 
origin the same, but so discrepant in potential thought 
that I can speak of the blueness that I perceive and 
of the sureness that I perceive it, without the risk 
even of entangling my speech in appearing to be 
announcing two separate perceivings. 

When my perception recurs, however, the old con- 
viction recurs, and with it flashes the intervening 
events. And this thing is redoubled endlessly. 

I see a light, for example. Along with it is the 
recurrence of my seeing it before ; along with that the 
old conviction ; if you please simply in its transcript : 
along with that a new conviction. I close my eyes and 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge. ioi 

open them again ; and there is the light again and a 
new conviction. These things we are repeating all the 
time* And to say that we cannot spell out the past as 
past, and the distant as distant,* and the future as 
predicable upon the past, by the help of a complete 
return of old perceptions with the convictions that 
attended them, is to deny the perceptive clearness of 
each act and its full recurrent consciousness. 

Besides, there are side lights from Sensation. 

We cannot fully understand this till we come to 
speak of Sense in the next department. But we can go 
upon received ideas far enough to explain what we mean. 

Suppose the recurrent conviction were a mere 
transcript, that is, the mere idea of a conviction, rather 
than a conviction itself. We are willing to suppose 
that, because we are willing to admit that the recur- 
rent perception is rather a copy of the perception, and 
that altogether faded, than a recurrence of the percep- 
tion itself. 

Now suppose the sheer influence of such an instance 
of a mere copy of a conviction were originally only 
enough to suggest an experiment, and that with an 
infant it began with that mere tentative experience. 
Do we not see how rapidly it would grow ? All nature 
is full of harmony. Little Chubby-cheeks, very bright as 
to sense, but very empty empirically, stuffs his fist into 
a pillow. Instantly it is a matter of memory. Now I 
do not believe he cognizes the touch as past by a pri- 
mordial faculty, but that the cool feeling was pleasant, 
and has a power to recur. Moreover, a conviction 
recurs with it, or, if you please, the picture of a con- 
viction, that it was cool and pleasant. Many actual 

* This, however, cannot be articulately understood till we come to 
speak of Sensation. 



102 Logic. [Book II. 

touches would be necessary before he could build up 
the requisite experience ; but each punch bringing its 
memories, and each memory aligned in a vista of con- 
victions, and all convictions blended into one like the 
pictures under a stereoscopic lens, the child would, 
begin to punch for himself, and would build up, before 
he became a man, his own complete circle of empirical 
predictions. 

2. We are strong now against that almost over- 
powering objection, that a man must have the noblest 
knowledge in the form of some mere fleeting percep- 
tion. Yes ! For what may not that perception be ? 
He may have a perception of the heavens. He may- 
be in the night of a dungeon, and may just think of it. 
That is, he may have the recurrence of the stars and 
of the starry frame as one picture. He may have it 
with all its past convictions. He may run riot in 
trooping memories. And to say nothing of the changes 
of the thought, the picture at each conscious moment 
will be that of the Strongest Emotion to his mind. 

V. Returning to the man in the boat, we will be able 
to answer to our fifth point, which is, the Single Form 
to which all our Empirical Knowledge can be reduced. 

1. He lies in the bottom, and there simply recurs 
a house with lawn and garden, and all the attendant 
facts as we have repeatedly described. Here the form 
of Empirical Knowledge is simply memory : the recur- 
rence of the house ; the recurrence of intervening indicia 
of the house ; and the recurrence chiefly and more im- 
portant than the rest, of repeated convictions of all the 
cognitive realties. This shall be our first instance. 

2. The second is of the man standing in the boat 
and looking at the house and judging of the interven- 
ing distance. 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knozvledge. 103 

3. The third is of the man rising from the boat and 
predicting as he rises, in his glance, the lawn, the gar- 
den, and the house, just as they appear in the Other 
instance. 

Now I have shown that the first is a single, the 
second a double, and the third a triple, instance of the 
phenomenon of memory. In the first I remember the 
house. In the second (1) I remember houses (how they 
look, etc.), so that I perceive this to be a house, * and 
(2) I remember distances, and how objects help to 
measure them, so that I cognize this house as distant. 
In the third, (1) I remember this house, (2) I remem- 
ber and judge its distance, and (3) I remember and 
predict that a house once perceived may at that point 
be perceived again. 

Now what does all this teach ? Why, at first 
glance, every one would say, that knowledge empiri- 
cally considered, in these instances at least, is nothing 
more in the world than Memory. And so it is, in 
an instrumental sense. But, in its ground, Memory 
itself shares with it in something deeper. Memory 
itself is but an instance of Empirical Knowledge. 
As an instrument it does all the work. All Empi- 
rical Knowledge is an act of Memory. For, as all 
Empirical Knowledge is built upon experience, Mem- 
ory, that gathers it up, is the active agent in every 
part of it. All experience is Memory, and all Mem- 
ory experience; and though it will not do to say 
I remember that a thing will happen, or I remember 
that that house that we are looking at must be a 
mile off, yet it might do to talk in that way, and 

* Of course all this is premature to any extent further than we design 
to illustrate, as we have not yet explained how we perceive a house 
at all. 



104 Logic. [Book II. 

would do beyond a doubt, if it were the usus loquendi. 
Both statements are made by means of what we 
remember. 

If we will distinguish, accordingly, between the in- 
strument of Empirical Knowledge and the ground of 
Empirical Knowledge, Memory is doubtless the former, 
and we remain free, as a distinct question, to ask, What 
is the latter? 

Now the ground of our Empirical Knowledge is 
the orderliness of our perceptions. 

If our perceptions were all sporadic, like fire-flies 
gleaming in the night, we could have nothing empiri- 
cal. But, as it is, we have two orders. We have the 
order of external nature, which we will treat when we 
come to speak of Sensation, and we have the order of 
perceptive laws. Both of these beget the one order 
of perception. It is on the ground of the orderliness 
of perception that is bred empirical belief. 

Nor let some one who doubts this as the final truth 
interpose the idea of the truth of our perception. 

The ground of Intuitive Knowledge, it might be 
argued, is the veracity of consciousness. Now if the 
ground of Intuitive Knowledge is the veracity of con- 
sciousness, the ground of Empirical Knowledge is the 
veracity of memory; or as memory is so entirely com- 
plex, the veracity of those blended consciousnesses, re- 
current and original, which makeup that blended whole 
which is an act of memory. The veracity of conscious- 
ness; it has often been insisted on as evident, must be 
our final support in all our possible convictions. 

But let us look at this very carefully. 

If Knowledge of any sort is based upon the veracity 
of consciousness, it must differ as a matter of course 
from consciousness itself. Consciousness must be one 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge. 105 

thing, and certain facts that it veraciously teaches 
must be numerically another, or there is no pith in 
such a proposition. 

But consciousness, as we have consistently taught, 
is itself the fact in intuitive cognition. All our intui- 
tive knowledge is our present consciousness. Now to 
make the veracity of consciousness the ground of con- 
sciousness itself is empty to the last degree. And the 
only significant speech is, that our belief in conscious- 
ness, or our trust in our conscious cognition, is imbed- 
ded in the act itself. To know that I perceive is nothing 
more in the world than to perceive. And to know 
anything else than that I perceive, is not intuitive 
knowledge. And to build up that something else on 
what is called the veracity of consciousness is to evoke 
a figment, totally different I grant, but at the same 
time totally false as compared with absolute con- 
sciousness. 

The ground of Intuitive Knowledge, therefore, 
is itself. The reason I have it is because it is itself the 
thing known. 

The ground of Empirical Knowledge is the order 
of perception, just as the ground of Intuitive is the per- 
ception itself. The ground of Empirical Knowledge, 
therefore, is an order which I find to be. 

Let us study this ; and then we will be at the end 
of a long chapter. 

The ground of any knowledge is the reason why 
we believe it. The ground of Intuitive Knowledge is 
consciousness itself. The ground of Empirical Knowl- 
edge is consciousness itself revealing itself in a certain 
order. The degree of Intuitive Knowledge is absolute. 
We are certain of everything that we intuitively know. 
The degree of our Empirical Knowledge is not abso- 

5* 



106 Logic. [Book II. 

lute. Now, if both be grounded on consciousness, 
whence this difference, and how can consciousness, 
which is sure, be the ground of anything that is essen- 
tially uncertain? These are critical questions, and 
indeed vital to the possibilities of Logic. 

I begin by asking, Can I, or can I not, perceive any 
order in my perceptions? 

In my perceptions in space I can ; for though we 
have not studied Ontology yet, still this much is a 
matter of consciousness. I look out on the starry 
heavens, and the order of moon and comet and cloud 
and the belt of Orion consciously appears to me. In 
fact, all that is synchronous in the current of whatever 
sort has its order when it comes into notice. But can 
I be conscious of order in my perceptions in time ? 
Without Recurrence I certainly could not. For 
though there is a flux of the current during the con- 
scious instant ; that is, from the law of Continuance,* a 
flowing off and coming on during the moments in 
which the perceptions are lasting ; still, if the percep- 
tions leaped off and fell into the dark and never 
returned to us, we could know nothing essentially of 
order in time. 

But how is it at present ? Past perceptions come 
back to us with a suggestion of much that intervenes. 
They come back to us as images of themselves, but 
nevertheless with the conviction (or the image of it) 
that they were not images at the time that they 
occurred. They come back in all their order, like 
present visions. Then we have this much at least, 
that we have in our actual consciousness orderly 
images of the past coming back into the current by 
the law of Recurrence. 

* See B, i, chap, xxxviii. 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge. 107 

We have an order of perceptions in space ; we 
have an order of perceptions in time ; both, in our con- 
sciousness ; both actual ; that is, both absolute percep- 
tions ; but the first assertatory only of themselves as 
of the present moment ; and the last assertatory also of 
themselves as of the present moment, but assertatory 
also of their character as images of the past. How do 
they get that last assertatory character ? 

Now to this we are ready to reply by six propo- 
sitions : — 

1. First ; not only do past perceptions recur, but 
they recur with their essential convictions, one of these 
convictions having been of their being actual percep- 
tions. As this conviction was conscious, and all con- 
scious phenomena have the law that they recur, this 
conscious conviction may recur. And though it be a 
mere copy of a conviction, still what is that ? and I 
appeal to consciousness whether it has not some affirm- 
ing character. 

2. Second ; if it have the least affirming character, 
it becomes great by ceaseless and multiform redupli- 
cation. Grant that I see a house, and that each time I 
see it I am convinced of my conscious perception ; and 
that that conviction, being conscious, recurs, like the 
perception itself ; and that when the perception recurs 
conviction recurs, and with it the still earlier convic- 
tion, and so, like the two plates of the stereoscope, one 
adds vividness to the other, and so on in an endless 
progression, — and I think it cannot remain unapparent 
how convictions may grow, so that the mere sight of a 
thought may recognize it as passed, and fix it in time, 
just like an object in space by the tokens of present 
sensation. 

3. This is still more easy to conceive under the law 



108 Logic. [Book II. 

of the Strongest Emotion, by which the recurrent 
thought pictures itself in its actual connections ; 

4. And yet again more easy by the bearing of sense 
upon memory. I lift up my eyes and see a house. I 
shut them and remember it. 1 open them and see it 
again. I can do this a hundred times. Each of these 
acts is conscious. Each of them, therefore, will be 
recurrent. All of them agree perfectly. The agree- 
ment is recurrent. All convictions that they agree, 
and that they recur, and that we have done the one 
and the other thing and asked the one and the other 
question, and that they have been answered in but 
one way, all blend in one recurrent perception. And 
that a man cannot in this way locate in time what cor- 
respondingly he can locate in space appears to me to 
be inconsistently denying the possibilities of the present 
perception. 

5. When a conviction is once obtained it likewise 
is conscious and of course recurrent. It becomes, gen- 
eral also. I know thought as past by its very glance, 
just as a house as distant. It has become an alpha- 
bet ; that is, I mean, the very look of a past thought. 
I learn to know my consciousnesses, as a man does his 
flocks and herds, and simply by their looks. That tall 
image is a house. It stands there over the plain. 
You can touch it if you travel far enough. I know this 
by experience. Yon ghost-like thought, not actual, 
not really white or really square, but the image of such 
realities, is just the hue and g*uise of a thing remem- 
bered. I know it as such by the light of a life's exper- 
iments. I know a dream ; and I know the memory 
of a dream; and I know a mere fancy, i. e. a mere 
fancied house, never actual, that is, that cannot place 
itself in any actual picture. I know each and all, as a 



Chap. IX.] Ground of Empirical Knowledge. 109 

girl knows the keys of her piano. I know them in the 
same way. And I cannot insist too narrowly upon the 
light that is thrown upon recurrent convictions of what 
has taken place in time, by convictions of the external 
world, and of the place things occupy in space under 
actual sensation. 

6. All moreover reduces itself just to one formula, 
viz. What has been will be. ' This is not an axiom 
either, but a mere fact. When it ceases to be so, 
knowledge vanishes. I believe I saw a house. Why? 
Because whenever such appearances recurred, when I 
went to the spot I found one. I believe it is a mile 
off. Why? Because whenever the field and the 
grove and the sky looked just so and so wide and so 
shaded as these intervening objects look, I have walked 
a mile and come to the object. I believe over there 
we will find a boat. Why ? Because I have been to 
that sheet of water ever since I was a child and always 
found one. I believe the farm scene now before my 
mind is a dream and I dreamed it last night. Why? 
Because it looks like a dream (I mean the memory of 
one), and it has last night's surroundings. 

Let the uniformity of perception cease and the 
things that have been cease to be, and a dream will no 
longer be known the morning afterward, nor a house 
the day after it was seen, nor a sunrise as a thing to 
happen to-morrow, nor any recurrent conviction. Man 
will have to learn the new system in the place of the 
one that resolved itself into the not-self and the con- 
scious current. Perception has been a language to him 
like the dots of the telegraph, and he has learned to 
decipher it. It has led him up to God. Let that 
good Being give him no order for his perceptions, 
either sensational or recurrent, and they will teach him 



1 10 Logic. [Book II. 

nothing. Intuitive Knowledge would be but a spark. 
And Empirical Knowledge could not even be imagined ; 
for Empirical Knowledge is the discovery we make by 
the order of the conscious current. 

The kept up order of that current is therefore the 
ground of Empirical Knowledge. 

To prove it farther let us go backward. I go to 
the house. It is not there. Why ? Has my mind 
deceived me ? No : the house. The facts have 
changed. Nature has a different order. I look in my 
mind. The house recurs. I go to it and it is a differ- 
ent house. I recollect this last and pay the visit 
again. It is again different. What now ! Is my mind 
deceiving me ? That may be very possible. It is not 
deceiving me as to the contents of its perception. I 
perceive plainly enough. I perceive what I perceive, 
and feel what I feel. My intuitive knowledge is per- 
fect. A deranged man has perfect intuitive knowl- 
edge, i. e. he perceives what he perceives. But my 
empirical knowledge is all awry. Order has fled. 

CHAPTER X. 

THREE KINDS OF EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 

As Intuitive Knowledge is Consciousness, so Em- 
pirical Knowledge is grounded upon an order in con- 
sciousness, or upon a fact discovered in experience, 
that what things have been will be. Now, to be more 
precise in our statement, what things have been will 
never be again. 

The things that come under the eye of our con- 
sciousness are perceptions. And it is the order of 
perceptions, discovered empirically, that constitutes ex- 
perience. But it is like perceptions, not the same, that, 



Chap. X.] Kinds of Empirical Knowledge. 1 1 1 

having been, we learn empirically, do happen again. 
Empiricism is a great system of analogy. 

Now of this analogy there are three sorts : — Abso- 
lute Analogy, Partial Analogy, and Analogy undiscov- 
erable except by intermediate resemblances. They are 
all the same thing, — Analogy. They are all traced by 
the same thing, — Experience. They all employ the 
same instrument, — Memory. They all build the same 
system, — Logic. And they all point to this fact, — 
that conscious perception and its analogies, that is its 
discovered order, make up the whole of the knowl- 
edge unfolded to our species. 

We must from the very beginning see clearly that 
these three are all monogonous. The first is often 
referred to Consciousness; the second, to Intuitive 
Belief so-called, a myth that has had a most wonderful 
place in modern investigation ; the third has been 
given the whole of Logic. Now the harm has been 
inconceivable. It has kept us back from simple views ; 
and prevented what I firmly believe easy, viz. the 
making of Logic to consist in the mere tracing of con- 
sciousness and its analogies. That when I see a 
horse it is the horse I saw yesterday, i. e. Absolute 
Analogy ; that when I see a horse it is a horse — i. e. 
Partial Analogy (though the horse may be different 
from nine-tenths of the horses I ever saw before) ; 
and that when I see a bone from the pastern of an 
animal I perceive it to be the pastern of a mammal, 
though by intermediate analogies the steps of which I 
have forgotten ; — these are the three species of empiri- 
cal faith. And though so apparently diverse the one 
from the other, they are all in principle the same. They 
are all the dictum of consciousness, and the dictum of 
the conscious fact, discovered by recurrence in the way 



112 Logic. [Book II. 

I have articulately given, that perception has an orderly 
course, the bifold order (i) of what we have yet to treat 
in outward sensation, and (2) of what we have so care- 
fully marked in the grouping of what is associatedly 
recurrent. 

Now let us treat the three kinds more definitely 
and in an elementary light. 

1. I brought in the chime of bells, and I intended 
them for this distinct service. I imagined one bell 
and one stroke repeated at a determined interval. The 
expectation of that bell would be a mere perception 
of a fact, or a LIKElihood as we significantly describe 
it ; and if it did not ring, it would not violate a con- 
sciousness or a separate conscious act, but simply a 
fact about the bell. We would cry out, It has quit ring- 
ing ! We are so constituted by the affirmance of our 
present knowledge, and by the recurrence of convictions 
that are redoubled, that we can note the habits of our 
perception, and mark that when it has sounded once it 
sounds again. 

Now this is Absolute Analogy. 

And I can go a little further and make it much 
more complex, and still not deprive it of this absolute 
degree. 

Suppose that with one second between each of the 
bells the whole chime is set afloat in the belfry. Sup- 
pose it continues for twenty years. Here again is 
Absolute Analogy. If it continues at determined 
intervals and in the order of the scale, while it is not 
the same stroke of course, it is a like stroke ; while it 
is not the same perception, it is a like perception ; it is 
a prediction of what I have never heard by the light 
of what I have heard. It is not, What has been will 
be, which is therefore an imperfect formulary, but, The 



Chap. X.] Kinds of Empirical Knowledge. 1 1 3 

like will happen again. It is, therefore, an instance of 
analogy, and in this case of absolute analogy. The 
identical strokes are never repeated, but precisely sim- 
lar ones, with the peculiarity of their note and in the 
order of the diatonic scale. 

We might make the similarity, too, far more intri- 
cate, and yet not depart out of the category of absolute 
or complete analogy. 

2. But, secondly, let the chime ring any notes of 
the scale, or at all hours of the day, but simply keep 
ringing. Suppose it had done this for twenty years. 
Suppose it did it scarcely at all some days, but never 
omitted it altogether. There would still be analogy, 
and still prediction, but it would be Partial Analogy, 
and this is a great track by which we climb to the being 
of the Almighty. 

I see an animal in a gate. The gate hides all but 
her hinder half. I have never seen any other part of 
her. She has legs and tail, but unlike any other ani- 
mal. They are not the legs of a horse, nor of a cow, 
nor of a deer, nor of a moose ; but yet they are like 
all four. What can I tell ? I can tell it is a quadruped, 
by mere analogy. I say, Let me go round the gate, 
and I will see head and ears and eyes totally unlike all 
I have ever witnessed, and yet like. The principle is 
just the same as if it were my own cow and I knew 
her perfectly. And if I went round the gate and found 
the fins of a whale, it would shock no intuitive belief, 
but only multiplied experience. If it seemed my own 
cow, and I found her a fish, it would be precisely the 
same. The shock would be greater. But it would 
only be the interruption of the order of what I have 
beheld. My mind by recurrence can take hold of the 
past. And I would express it all by saying, as the 



1 14 Logic. [Book. II. 

acme of the mystery, not, My Intuitions are failing, 
but, Did ever anybody see the LIKE ? » 

3. Suppose the tower, like the statue of Memnon, 
chimed its own bells ; and that, by action of the morn- 
ing sun. Suppose I had it all explained to me, and 
had understood the steps. The expansion of the ma- 
sonry on the easternmost side; that would be one 
analogy. Like happening to like, too, about some iron 
rods ; that would be another. It might be a long 
catenation that no man could carry as a whole, but 
that any man could follow in its parts. Such would be 
the third species ; empirical knowledge, but with the 
steps forgotten, just leaving the investigator with the 
fact ; so that, coming up by recurrent conviction, he 
would be able to say, Sometimes (exactly when I am 
unable to state without going over the points,) that 
chime will ring of itself; and say it on the old ground 
of analogy or remembered order. 

CHAPTER XI. 

DEGREE OF EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 

The Degree of Empirical Knowledge will depend 
entirely upon the degree of the perceptive order. 
This might appear at first sight not the case. If a 
bell had rung every hour since I was born, and the 
sun had risen and no more regularly every day, I 
would believe much more in the rising of the sun, 
though it had occurred twenty-four times less often 
than the occurrence of the other. 

But this will explain only more perfectly the doc- 
trine of experience. 

Experiences mat themselves together. Convic- 
tions are redoubled by borrowing from their kindred 



Chap. XIII.] Empirical Knowledge, 115 

class. The rising of the sun belongs to an order of 
causation. Causation, as we will hereafter learn, is but 
a dictum of experience. And yet it links together 
analogous phenomena. The rising of the sun is a cause 
of causes, made credible by other facts- that we fail to 
separate ; matted together with a maze of probabili- 
ties. And yet it is precisely analogous with the bell. 
The ground of belief is identically the same. The bell 
may never ring again, and the sun may never rise 
again. And if either never do, the ground of surprise 
would be elementarily the same. Nay that either 
some day never will is a like prediction. And, as a 
universal fact, the Degree of our Empirical Knowledge 
depends upon the uniformity of the order that has 
been previously perceived. 



CHAPTER XII. 

EXTENT OF EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 

By this if there be intended the extent of percep- 
tion at the time, of course it has been sufficiently de- 
lineated. But if there be intended (rather potentially) 
the classes of things that can become empirically 
known, I would answer, All past perceptions with their, 
analogies. As this is a difficult subject, I will divide 
it into the two that are to succeed. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE AS EMBRACING EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 

It is now familiar to the reader that in the con- 
scious current there is a phenomenon called Perception, 
which can be looked upon in the three aspects of Con- 



Il6 Logic. [Book II. 

sciousness, Emotion, and Cognition. It is also familiar 
to the reader that these aspects are not partial but 
total ; that is, that the whole of Perception is Con- 
sciousness, and the whole of Consciousness Emotion, 
and the whole of all or any, Cognition or any of the 
rest. 

Now grant tjie truth of what we have established, 
that there is nothing consciously in the mind at any 
moment except one of these more or less complex 
perceptions, and we have the easy inference that Empi- 
rical Knowledge, if conscious, is a conscious percep- 
tion. But if it be a conscious perception, it is entirely 
that and entirely conscious. Now if it be entirely con- 
scious, it is entirely consciousness ; and consciousness, 
by our very definitions, is Intuitive Knowledge. 

We have, therefore, the ugly result that Empirical 
Knowledge, which we have started out to make dis- 
tinct, reverts into the bosom of simple intuition. 

Moreover, all that is intuitive we have already 
found is absolute or certain, and all that is empirical is 
in our very statement of its degree essentially uncer- 
tain. How then can conscious empirical knowledge 
be consciousness, and therefore absolute in degree, and 
yet according to the facts be CONSCIOUSLY UN- 
CERTAIN ? 

Now fortunately this very last term is a fine key to 
the whole dilemma. Consciousness totally reveals all 
that is in its bosom, and reveals it intuitively. It 
reveals the exact appearance of the inward sight, what- 
ever that may be. But of course part of the appear- 
ance of the inward sight is uncertainty. 

If I see all that I see, intuitively, and therefore cer- 
tainly, it does not impair the completeness of that 
sight, but rather enhances it, that I see things con- 



Chap. XIII.] Empirical Knowledge. 1 17 

sciously and just as they are, if what they are is in its 
own nature necessarily uncertain. 

I have but to preserve the same meaning for per- 
ceptive cognition, and make it always mean the per- 
ceptive aspect of an inward consciousness, and it would 
be always absolute, and always certain, and always 
intuitive, and Intuitive Knowledge would then fairly 
include the whole circle of our possible cognitions. 

But Knowledge has slipped from one sense to 
another. 

I see, for example, a pair of doves. I am perfectly 
conscious of the sensational impression. All that the 
doves work upon my perceivings and upon my con- 
scious state at any one time I am articulately aware of. 
Nothing escapes me that is consciously present. Who 
shall say that all this is not Intuitive Knowledge? 
But one of the facts intuitively known is that one of 
the apparitions I call a dove, that is, one of the white 
surfaces or buff colored phenomena of vision, I care 
care not what you call it, may or may not be equal to 
the other. This I intuitively see. This is, in fact, the 
thing known. The knowledge in the case is a knowl- 
edge of uncertainty. And the corruption of speech is 
in taking the word knowledge, which might well be 
left for perceptive cognitions, and applying it to some- 
thing else, that is, not to the perceptive cognition of a 
fact, but to the perceptive cognition of the greater or 
less probability of a fact, or in other words to the 
mere belief that a certain bird is bigger than the other. 

When I say, therefore, I know that the doves are 
equal, if I supply the ellipsis, and say, I know that 
they seem equal, or am conscious of a likeness in the 
visions, I am translating the conclusion into the actual 
phenomena of thought. I keep the word knowledge 



Il8 Logic. [Book II. 

for my actual conscious intuitions. I show that doubts 
and measured probabilities are part of the objects of 
my consciousness. I mark the genesis, so to speak, 
of all that is empirical. And I explain how, in the 
strictest metaphysical sense, apart from the use of 
terms, Intuitive Knowledge includes the other form 
of our alleged cognitions. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE AS DISTINCT FROM EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. 

It has not pleased the popular ear, however, to 
retain the word knowledge for what is conscious so 
far forth as it is conscious and therefore certain. But, 
there being conscious thoughts which are certain in 
themselves, as all thoughts are, but marked by certain 
uncertainties, which are consciously and hence intui- 
tively known, and therefore matters of direct and 
absolute knowledge, it has not pleased the public to 
state facts that way, but to cut across lots, so to speak, 
and instead of saying I am conscious of a high prob- 
ability that those doves are equal, to say I know they 
are ; which means, I am conscious that they seem so, 
and take the seeming for a full cognition. 

So, therefore, if we could discard this habit of the 
people, we could return to metaphysical strictness in 
this way : — We could say, I know that of which I am 
conscious, and nothing else. That would keep all things 
in their place, metaphysically, and therefore correctly. 
But among the things I know is the fact of certain un- 
certainties, which are just as open to my consciousness 
as blueness or fragrance or consciousness or certainty 
itself. This uncertainty appears before me in lesser or 
greater degrees, like blueness or cold ; and I am able 



Chap. XIV.] Empirical Knowledge. 1 19 

consciously to know a less or greater probability or 
uncertainty, and that as the very fact itself. Now, so 
long as I confine myself to facts, I can only say, I 
intuitively know the object of consciousness, that is, the 
uncertainty itself. And that is in fact all the phe- 
nomenon. But if I choose to translate it into other 
language, I can do so very usefully, not by employing 
spuriously the word knowledge, but by going off to 
other language altogether : by using for example the 
word belief; that is, by saying I am conscious that the 
hue of the sky seems the same all over ; therefore I 
believe that it is the same ; or, I am conscious of cer- 
tain pictures and convictions that look like as though 
a perception had been possessed before; therefore I 
believe that it has been possessed before ; belief not 
meaning, as it now sometimes does, my conscious intui- 
tions, except those of this single case, where I am 
intuitively conscious of greater or less uncertainties 
of one of the facts perceived. 

The question would then arise, Is belief in this case 
intuitive? I would say, It is. We might divide in 
this way then : — 

I. Intuitive Knowledge. 

II. Intuitive Belief. And this would have to in- 
clude 1st, Direct Intuitive Belief; as, for example, where 
I see two lines abreast, and believe that they have 
equal length; and 2d, Empirical Intuitive Belief; 
which is now just that Empirical Knowledge which is 
so important in philosophy. 

1st. Direct Intuitive Belief has no outgoings, and 
therefore is just what it seems to be at the moment of 
perception. It is no more than my simple conscious- 
ness of the state of the uncertainty when uncertainty 
is my phenomenal consciousness. I see blue all over 



120 Logic. [Book II. 

the sky. I am conscious that it seems alike ; but it 
may not be. I am conscious of what seems a point, 
but it may not be. It may be two points minutely 
separated. Beliefs like this are innumerable like the 
leaves of the forest. 

But there is no outcome in them. That is to say 
(to explain this twice repeated expression), the moment 
we verify the belief, it becomes, as we shall see, 
Empirical. 

2d. Empirical Intuitive Belief differs from Direct 
Intuitive Belief, in the employment of Memory. 
Direct Intuitive Belief, though we never get it entirely 
separate from Empirical, yet, in theory, would be my 
Intuitive Knowledge that those lines, for example, 
seem equal, or that that point that I have supposed 
seems one. This seeming is in the very glance, with- 
out any employment of other impressions. And if I 
go nearer to the point, and it seems two, this also is, in 
that newer seeming, a Direct Intuitive Belief. More- 
over, if I had no Memory, it would be entirely distinct. 
An interval of time would have given me opposite and 
contradictory impressions. Moreover the actual im- 
pression in the case would have been true, as all mat- 
ters of consciousness are. That is, the actual contents 
of consciousness, paring off everything aside, are abso- 
lute or undeniable. I am conscious of what I am con- 
scious. I perceive what I do perceive. And if there 
was a fine white interval across the spot when I stood 
in the first position, and it was marked upon the retina, 
and might have been seen if I had perceived it, yet 
that does not affect the fact that all that I perceived 
reported itself just as I perceived it. And when I 
looked again, the two spots were just as I perceived 
them. And when I approached again, three spots 



Chap. XIV.] Empirical Knowledge. 121 

might have been developed. Now each separate intui- 
tion is Direct. But if I put them together, and go 
nearer for a purpose, and still nearer to try again, and 
the former is corrected by the later, that becomes Em- 
pirical, and Empirical in many ways : that is, it 
depends upon the order of nature, first, as to the con- 
tinuance of self, second, as to the reliableness of mem- 
ory, third, as to the continuance of the spots, and a 
great many other things. The moment I recede from 
what is Direct, I cast myself upon an immense Empir- 
ical generalization. 

The lines I adverted to are a similar instance. 
They look alike. But if I attempt to prove them 
alike, what do I do ? I act empirically ; that is, I 
employ a measure. I lose at once all Direct inspection. 
I launch upon a thousand uncertainties. And though 
they become practically what we call certain (and 
hence claim to be " Knowledge "), yet they are all un- 
certainties. The stick may have changed. The lines 
may have changed. The eye may have changed. The 
mind may have changed ; and so the memory. I am 
conscious of what I perceive ; but everything besides 
rests solely upon an order in Nature. 

We are prepared now to note the difference 
between Intuitive and Empirical Knowledge. We 
cannot use that word Belief, though metaphysically it 
would be very accurate. It would be displacing old 
usage. Belief means sometimes consciousness ; and 
consciousness means often belief. We could not dis- 
lodge such old peculiarities. We must be content to 
take language as it is. And we will understand Intui- 
tive Knowledge as simply consciousness, that is, my 
act at the time by which I perceive what I perceive; 
and my Empirical Knowledge as also consciousness, as 
6 



122 Logic. [Book II. 

nothing conscious is not, but consciousness of intuitive 
uncertainties, which, of course, are very many, and con- 
sciousness of that class of intuitive uncertainties which 
are made less so by the voice of empirical recurrence. 

The mind is conscious of some degrees in these 
uncertainties ; just as it is conscious of some degrees 
of black and white. And it is my consciousness 
of these degrees, which is as natural as any other 
perception, that marks the boundaries of empirical 
conviction. 

I am not sure that I have made enough of a cer- 
tain stereoscopic quality that I have noticed. Convic- 
tions redouble themselves. Let us look at this more 
narrowly. 

There can recur anything of which I am conscious. 
I am conscious of convictions. I am conscious of gen- 
eral convictions. I am conscious that when a house 
looks in a certain way, I have a conviction that it is 
distant. I am conscious when a thought looks in a 
certain way, that I have a conviction that it is past. 
No matter yet for the genesis of these facts ; you 
admit that they are conscious. Now, all things con- 
scious can recur. 

But if they can recur when so general, they doubt- 
less recurred when more particular. They recurred 
in their earliest asseverations. 

Let me explain this. 

I see a house. I have a conscious conviction of my 
consciousness whatever that consciousness is. I see it 
again. I have a conscious conviction again, and 
another conviction, viz, the older conviction recurrent. 
I see it again. Three convictions! I see it again. 
Four! I see a thousand other things. They multi- 
ply convictions. They mat themselves together. By 



Chap, xv.] Intuitive Beliefs So-Called. 123 

the law of harmonious association they blend them- 
selves into one. Like six thicknesses of tulle partially 
transparent they blend themselves into one brighter 
and more solid color. They blend themselves into 
universals of actual and instantaneous belief. And 
so perfect is it, this harmonious centring into one, that 
men call them original. It is the pride of modern 
philosophy to have found out this " Regulative Fac- 
ulty," as Hamilton calls it. There never was such a 
superb figment. It characterizes the present philoso- 
phy more than any other one trait. The schools are 
full of it. It is the convenient pack for all sorts of met- 
aphysical carriage. And in claiming for it antiquity 
of date, it is the faith widely most dominant in the 
thinking of modern times. 

It cannot stand, however, this distinct analysis of 
Recurrence. The coal shows the fern-leaves. The 
man thought, who first looked into the measures, that 
it was an original rock, like flint-stone or granite ; but 
the tell-tale print upon the seams hinted at last at the 
discovery. And so our recurrences, matted together 
like that ancient vegetation, abstract from themselves 
into universals, until the conviction that appears can 
hardly be realized as mere recurrent perception. 

CHAPTER XV. 

INTUITIVE BELIEFS SO-CALLED. 

Aristotle gained great influence over the Church ; 
but in later times, on this very account, and by a 
mis-reading of Paul in the First Epistle to the Corin- 
thians, philosophy has been at a discount ; and yet, by 
a strange caprice, a certain tenet in philosophy in the last 
fifty years has been erected almost into a tenet in religion. 



,124 Logic. [Book II. 

The Church and, in lesser degree, the Schools are 
like oysters. They shut more easily than they open. 
It is a provision of nature. By a law of the imperilled 
mollusk taste regulates its feeding, and taste is made 
by what it feeds upon. Th'e oyster, habituated to the 
past, snaps itself down to new food, and opens to all 
that is old. We would not have it different. At the 
same time doctrines have to be dispossessed ; and this 
Kantian belief, * which arrogates as original in the 
mind what is called an Intuitive Faculty, if it is, as we 
perfectly know, a fiction, gains by this habit. It has 
become entrenched in the creed. Theology will con- 
fidently tell us that the reverse is atheism. And, 
therefore, we must think with infinite care. Philosophy 
has had ill luck on the side of theism. Coming in she 
has been resisted, and going out she has been clung to 
as one with our salvation. , 

One device is always acceptable ; and that is, to be 
perfectly fair with what we attack, and that we shall 
attempt religiously toward the faith in question. We 
will consider first what it is not. We shall consider 
second what it distinctly is. We shall consider third 
what it says for itself, and fourth what can be said 
against it, and fifth whether it be an unnecessary doc- 
trine. The first three points belong to this chapter. 
The fourth and fifth to the two that follow. 

I. In the first place, Intuitive Belief is not old- 
fashioned intuition. I do not believe the sky is blue ; 
I see it. And to make this clear let me settle ambi- 

* " Thus it is that Hume became the cause or the occasion of all 
that is of principal value in our more recent metaphysics. Hume is the 
parent of the philosophy of Kant, and, through Kant, of the whole phi- 
losophy of Germany : he is the parent of the philosophy of Reid and 
Stewart in Scotland, and of all that is of preeminent note in the meta- 
physics of France and Italy." — Hamilton's Lectures (Am. Ed.), p. 545. 



Chap. XV.] Intuitive Beliefs So-C ailed. 125 

guities. Blueness has three meanings. First it is a 
sense. I do not believe in there being a blue. I see 
it as an actual sensation. Again, blueness is on the 
sky, painted on it, and included in it by the Lexicon. 
The peach, as we have already seen, includes its ruddi- 
ness. The blueness is a part of the heavens. This is 
Philology at her work, not Metaphysics. The name 
heavens includes the blueness. This, therefore, is the 
same as the first. I do not believe merely. I see: 
and so am conscious. The third sense is merely em- 
pirical ; and, therefore, not a consciousness, and not 
an intuition, but only the imagined power the air has 
to project blue upon the eye. 

Then, higher: taste! I see a lily. What are we 
to understand by beauty? To prevent mistakes we 
must again distinguish. Beauty is either first, sensa- 
tional, or second, what is mere dictionary-work, the 
sense transferred into the object, or third, -a power. 
The last is not intuitive, but only the gift, empirically 
thought of, that the lily has to awaken the emotion. 
The first views the emotion itself. The second views 
the same thing precisely, only transferred by human 
speech to the surface of the lily. Each use is reason- 
able. But the first and second are mere intuitions. 
The third is an empiricism. So that there is no room 
for Intuitive Beliefs. 

Again, a story higher. Let us come into the 
domain of right. This is not a color. It is mobile. 
It is the quality of an emotion.* Blueness is a paint- 
ing on the air. Beauty is a painting on the flower. 
That is, they can be transferred that way. But 
right is painted on an emotion. There is another 
difference : — We may have an emotion at an emotion 

* This we shall see hereafter (see Ethics). 



126 Logic. [Book II. 

in the respect of right ; not in the same way in the 
respect of beauty. For example ; I love others. 
That is an emotion. In that emotion is a conscious 
right. Again, I love that right. That is another 
emotion. Like blue upon the sky, right, whatever that 
consciously is, is seen to be upon this also. And now, 
the kindred ambiguities. Right is either the conscious 
nature of the good emotion, or else the conscious nature 
of the good emotion transferred as mere dictionary- 
work to an emotion looked at, or, thirdly, the quality 
of the emotion, or its imagined power, to awaken the 
sense of right, or breed the conception of it in the 
mind. These are mere differences of meaning. If we 
had more words, we could have a word for each of 
them. In either case there can be no Intuitive Belief. 
The first right is a consciousness, as much so as of blue 
or beauty. The second right is objectwise, but the 
same precisely as the other. The third right is the 
mere power to produce the others, viz. the fact about 
the emotion that it does produce a sense of right, as 
the lily does the emotion of the beautiful. We must 
wade through the dictionary, therefore, before we can 
reach the high ground, that right, like beauty, is of 
the contents of consciousness. 

II. That Intuitive Belief is not old-fashioned intui- 
tion, will help amazingly in the inquiry, what Intui- 
tive Belief really is. Old-fashioned intuition lays hold 
of beauty. It looks directly into it, as a matter of con- 
sciousness. It reveals it just as it is. It becomes aware 
of all of it just as it stands. For beauty is a certain 
tang of sense, like flavor of Johannisberg grapes, and 
there is nothing that can see it but intuition, and it 
sees it consciously, and sees the whole of it. But now 
take Causality. It is so different from beauty that Sir 



Chap. XV.] Intuitive Beliefs So-Called. 127 

William Hamilton could say (we think mistakenly) — " It 
is now universally admitted that we have no perception 
of the connection of cause and effect in the external 
world." Lectures (Am, Ed.)/. 541. Intuitive Beliefs lay 
hold of cause. See then the distinct difference between 
Intuitive Beliefs, and what we mean by old-fashioned 
intuition. Let me give other cases. Intuitive Beliefs 
lay hold of substance. They declare that qualities 
require substance. And this now will give us a fine 
opportunity to show what these credences most defi- 
nitely are. Given qualities, which I most directly 
inspect ; given, for example, red and hardness — of 
which I am directly conscious, and the mind has a be- 
lieving faculty, by which it posits substance ; though, 
as Sir William would declare, we have no immediate 
perception of substance in itself. Let us make this very 
clear. Given motion or sound, the sense of these things 
is directly conscious. It is therefore what we call an old- 
fashioned intuition. But the cause of these things we 
are not conscious of. We only assert it. We are 
conscious only of the assertion. The belief in this 
cause is an assertion in the reason. Such is the doc- 
trine. We are born into this world with this appanage 
of thought. Given any experience 'of effect, we opine 
a cause. And we do so necessarily and by force of an 
original intuition, which believes that a cause has sway. 
But we must be careful of our specifyings : — In the 
first place, men are not agreed as to these original 
truths. Their categories are endless. I have never 
seen two that were the same in every particular. In 
the second place, the. Belief itself is pictured differently. 
I cannot define it, because Hamilton, for example, 
would denounce me as positively unjust. There has 
been a flux since the days of Kant. So that Reid and 



128 Logic. [Book II. 

Reicl's commentator* have been opposite in belief. 
This contrariety is indicative of mistake. And Phi- 
losophy may well come in like a mother upon two quar- 
relling girls, and snatch the doll from both of them. 
The account of Sir William Hamilton that cause is 
from an inability to think the opposite, and the account 
of Thomas Reid that cause is a square-faced original 
and positive belief, are so plain-facedly quite different, 
that it requires a good-natured polemic to unite them 
doctrinally. 

We have, therefore, rather sketched the doctrine by 
example. 

But we do insist most positively upon a third point. 
There has been a shuffle in the game. Eluding even 
first-class philosophers, a fusion has occurred of these 
so called intuitions with other positive intuitions, but 
which are of a far different class. It is like the sale 
of a watch on Pearl Street. The watch is really gold, 
and is of an uncommon value, and is sold for a song; 
but the buyer never gets it ; for when it is the time 
that it should be delivered, there is a shuffle with 
something else. 

We cannot move a step without making this clear. 

That two and two are four is obvious, and we are 
born to believe it. That things that are equal to the 
same thing are equal to each other ; that the whole is 
greater than its part ; that it is impossible for a thing 
to be and not to be, — is intuitive enough. Call it what 
you please, a man had better be dead than not have 
some faculty to tell him such things as these. So the 
Regulative Faculty of Hamilton, and the Vernunft of 
Kant, and the necessity-belief of Leibnitz, things 
seriously different, and yet, as we have seen, claiming 
to be the same thing, have at least been the same 



Chap. XV.] Intuitive Beliefs So-Called. 129 

thing in this, that they have swept into the same indis- 
criminated heap two entirely different classes of affir- 
mation. 

That the whole is greater than its part is one thing. 
That every change must have a cause is a very differ- 
ent thing. These two things are metaphysical anti- 
podes. And yet the two have been swept into the 
one basket. I know not that any one has detected it. 
This undetected introspective legerdemain has had 
unspeakable results. The one sort of notion is neces- 
sary. We are forced to have it. It is, therefore, uni- 
versal. And seeming to be born with a power to see 
such things, some native-born faculty seems to be con- 
fessed. If any one seems to hesitate about cause, 
some other fish in the basket is brought up, and. some 
such truth as that it is impossible for the same thing 
to be and not to be is made to knock down opposition, 
if experience is pleaded as sufficient for that other 
asseveration. 

The thing is a shuffle. 

The remedy is to upset the basket. 

Our right is to sort those fish out. 

Here are two perfectly distinct classes. 

One is of the sort, — It is impossible for the same 
thing to be and not to be. The other is of the sort, — 
that every change must have a cause. 

One is a truism. That is now the solution. That 
the whole is greater than a part means that it is the 
whole. That things that are equal to the same thing 
are equal, means simply that they are equal. The thing 
is chop-logic. There is no aggression in the thought, 
and therefore of course a man is born to see it. But 
the truth that a change must have a cause is different. 
It is aggressive. This ought to have been the intui- 



1 30 Logic. [Book II. 

tion aimed at. That those others are Intuitive Beliefs 
so-called, I cannot deny. That they are not included 
by Hamilton, I cannot assever. They are unquestion- 
ably. I can only say, — They ought not to be. And 
whether they ought or not, we at least shall treat 
them separately. One sort are truisms, and therefore 
are not Intuitive Beliefs, but simple consciousnesses. 
The other sort are discovered facts, heaven-wide from 
the first, and really the field on which the Kantian bat- 
tle will have to be arrayed. 

III. The second point, therefore, viz. What are 
Intuitive Beliefs ? prepares us aptly for the third 
point, viz. What are the proofs of them? 1. And 
first we are told that we have this regulative vision, 
because we are conscious of its exercise. And here at 
once we must make a distinction. I know that I am 
conscious of the vision that two and two are four, and 
that an apple occupies space, and that perceiving oc- 
cupies time. I know, therefore, that I cognize space 
and time. I know that the apple is extended, and I 
know that the extended apple is nothing more than 
the apple occupying space, and that the continuous 
perception is nothing more than the perception occu- 
pying time. Space and time, therefore, are conscious- 
nesses. Moreover they are not beings : they are not en- 
tities ; so that in existence they are nothing ; they are 
mere abstractions, and, therefore, conscious thoughts, 
and, as applied to objects, conscious facts. Space is no 
more an essence by itself than extension is ; or time, than 
continuousness is ; and that they are infinite, means 
only what may be said of any consciousness ; for sound 
and taste and angularity and tint and sphericity and 
surface may be made various in infinite ways, and 
endure through infinite dates, and be abstracted from 



Chap. XV.J Intuitive Beliefs So-Called. 131 

for infinite varieties of idea. Whether we can con- 
ceive the infinite is mere child's talk. The peasant- 
man might scout it, if he merely had nerve to think. 
Infinitude is a mere made up idea. And having put it 
beyond conception by its very terms, viz. as devoid of 
boundary, half the questions that are built upon it are 
the mere dazing of the mind, as when we chafe and rub 
our eyes, and then amuse ourselves with the confu- 
sion of their first artificially palsied vision. 

This obvious class are undoubted intuitions. And 
so of others that we mentioned before. That the 
whole is greater than its parts; that whatever is, is; 
or, set down with mere verbal variety, that it is im- 
possible for the same thing to be and not to be ; and 
an infinite horde of just such tautological expressions, — 
are undoubtedly Intuitive Beliefs ; and that, because 
we are conscious of it. So that unquestionably this 
first proof does apply to these truistic expressions. 
But then we mention that fact simply to get rid of it. 
These beliefs are conscious simply because they are con- 
sciousnesses. And they are consciousnesses all through. 
They are not beliefs as the Kantians intend. They 
are not the mind projecting itself ex se by the force of 
an original belief but merely the mind turning round 
upon a hinge, or rather exhibiting its consciousnesses 
when they are merely assertatory of themselves. 

The force of the first proof, therefore, we only 
dignify with treatment when it applies to the second 
class, — truths that are really aggressive ; and here it is 
stoutly pressed, encouraged though I feel sure by the 
confusion of this class with the other. ' Quality 
requires substance.' This is a specimen of the more 
genuine class. This the Kantian calls an Intuitive 
Belief. Let us state another. ' Change implies cause.' 



I3 2 Logic. [Book II. 

This also asserts something. Now, says the Kantian, 
— Cause is not a consciousness, and I am not directly 
conscious of the cause itself; but I believe its exist- 
ence. And the same of substance. I am born with 
a faculty such that, on experience of effects, I assert 
both cause and substance. And the first proof is, that 
I am conscious I do. This the first proof. And we 
lay it away in its distinctness for future refutation. 

2. The second proof professes to be different. 
Consciousness, these new philosophers declare, is 

an evanescent vision. It is not granite. It is not God. 
If therefore I am conscious only of my consciousness, 
and if now it is distinctly declared that consciousness 
fills all our thinking, and if this further is so much the 
case that consciousness is conscious only of itself, how 
prythee does it get beyond it? 

3. This might seem to vary in a third proof. There 
is a cosmos : is there not ? That question these 
philosophers may most rightfully press. If there be 
a cosmos, might we not have a need to know it ? — to 
know God, if there be one? nay, to know self? Here 
the advantage seems to be enormous. If there be a 
universe, is it not better that I should believe it ? The 
last argument was, — Do I not believe it ? This argu- 
ment is, Do I not imperatively need to ? And now the 
whole presses, — How can I believe in anything, if it 
be cosmos, if it be actual existence, if it be abiding 
rock, or if it be Eternal Spirit, if it be demonstrable 
that my knowledges are cut down to what is con- 
sciousness, and I have no power per saltum to lay 
hold of being? 

It is on this rock that the intuitionist scoffs at his 
empirical opponent. All seems a truism. Thinking 
is thinking and being is being. It seems as easy to 



Chap. XV.] Intuitive Beliefs So-Called. 133 

make one out of the other as Cheops out of soap-bub- 
bles. And it makes men arrogant. How can they be 
thought insulting if they refuse to argue? If we have 
built a high fence, and made the absurdity the more 
distinct, stating, till men have no power to restate it, 
that consciousness is everything that is in the current, 
and then following into the very region of relief, and 
cutting off all possibility of it by saying that conscious- 
ness can only be conscious when it is conscious of itself, 
we seem to have written our own fate, and to have 
announced that unless Cheops be consciousness we may 
stand and look at it and there may no pyramid exist. 

4. Then a fourth proof, the argument of Leibnitz. 
Suppose I could see cause. Suppose Hamilton were 
wrong (Lectures p. 545), and it were not " universally 
[to be] admitted that we have no perception of the 
connection of cause and effect," we are now to climb 
to the very topmost argument as all these Kantian 
Intuitionists profess. Suppose it were admitted that 
we were even conscious of causality. The great in- 
vention of Leibnitz,, so these men declare, is what 
they call the argument from necessity. It is the 
prince-dictum of modern times. It amounts to this, — 
that if we had seen substance, and been conscious 
of cause, if there were no difficulty in foro conscien- 
tice, but we had looked them to the bottom, still there 
is a need of them that the mere sight of them could 
never give ; there is a 6rl which quite transcends the 
simple 6v; so that had we seen cause a thousand times, 
an averment would be missing that every change is 
bound to have one. 

5. And now, one more formula of proof. This 
averment, we are taught, is Intuitive Belief. And 
another view is the doctrine of universals. 



134 Logic. [Book II. 

I see red. I see blue. I see both a myriad of 
times. Each time I see them something asserts gross 
particles behind them. That something is Intuitive 
Belief. And yet there is still another ground for say- 
ing so : at least so it is pretended ; and that is the 
doctrine of universals. If I could see them without 
such a faculty, I would still need it in the gross, for 
there is something that asserts that the gross particles 
must be always present. I might see them a thousand 
times, and yet that experientially would not decree 
them universal. I see a sunrise a thousand times, and 
thereanent make no prediction that it will be always. 
But I see the red and blue a thousand times, and 
immediately assever, that universally the red and the 
blue will ever more require the presence of substance.. 

Hence, therefore, fifthly, there must be Intuitive 
Beliefs. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

NO SUCH THING AS INTUITIVE BELIEFS, SO-CALLED. 

I. Now, the first thing we do with all these argu- 
ments is to pronounce them the same. 

The first, viz. that we are conscious of Intuitive 
Beliefs, is the same precisely as the second. The 
second is, that we have arrived at the belief of being, 
and could not have done so without these intuitive 
cognitions. But that we are conscious of Intuitive Be- 
liefs, and conscious of thoughts that could not have 
been obtained without them, mean precisely the same 
thing. That I am conscious of Intuitive Beliefs 
means that I believe, for example, in cause and sub- 
stance. That I believe in cause and substance, and 
therefore must have just such beliefs, means in the 



Chap. XVI.] No Intuitive Beliefs. 135 

Kantian dialect simply that I am conscious of them. 
If any one doubts that this is so, let him try to put a 
knife-blade of difference between these two proofs 
after he has carefully studied them. Again if there be 
an external world, the saltus from the within to the 
without must be made by just such a faculty. But 
where is the force of this third proof? Simply an in- 
vincible belief. I believe that there is an external 
world, and therefore am conscious of such a belief. 
So Leibnitz's proof: a cause is necessary : there is an 
element of necessity in these Intuitive Beliefs. This 
is the fourth proof. But what does that amount to ? 
This, — that I consciously believe so. But that was 
stated in the first. That I consciously believe there 
must be causality includes the second proof, — that 
I know causality, and the third proof, — that there 
notoriously is causality, and the fourth proof, — that 
there must be causality, viz. that it is consciously ne- 
cessary, and now also the fifth proof, viz. that it is uni- 
versal ; the Intuitive Belief that the existence of a 
cause is necessary being identical in its very nature 
with the conviction that its necessity must be universal. 

The proofs of Kantianism, therefore, are all a unit. 

II. But so, in the second place, are the refutations. 

I am to be taught that I know the ego by an 
Intuitive Faculty. 

Or, keeping out still among externals, I am to be 
taught that I know cause by an Intuitive Faculty. 
Now, WHAT DISTINCTLY IS IT THAT I KNOW ? That 
is the crowbar that is to pull down the building. To 
know a thing I must know it. To believe a thing, 
even though that be the phrase under which I hide 
the indistinctness, I must know, to some measure at 
least, what it is that I believe in. This was the tremor 



l$6 Logic. [Book II. 

that had reached Sir William. He had confessed 
boldly, — " We have no perception of the connection 
of cause and effect " (Lect. p. 541). Nevertheless he 
admits that " we cannot believe without some con- 
sciousness or knowledge of the object of the belief" 
(Logic, p. 385). Whereupon he does not go bravely 
and ask (what would explode his theory) — \ How then 
can we believe the connection of cause and effect ? ' 
But he does say, and that toward the close of his 
career, — " Just here is one of the most difficult prob- 
lems of which Metaphysics attempts the solution " 
(Logic, p. 385). 

Still, let us com'plete the argument. To believe hi 
cause I must know something of what cause is. You 
may say, — No ; it transcends idea, and is in the region 
of mere conviction. But you forget. Conviction of 
what ? This is the difficulty that pressed Sir William 
Hamilton. You forget that c-a-u-s-e is an English 
vocable. To believe in five characters is to believe 
incontinently nothing. We force the answer, — What 
is it you intuitively believe ? And there are few cases 
where a system lies so naked to the lance. A theory 
grown reverend with age is really quite open to a 
child's undoing. 

To believe, I must in some measure see. The 
measure that I see is the measure of my practical con- 
viction. Tell me how I see, and I will tell you how I 
get my practical belief. I cannot consciously believe 
till I in some measure consciously know. Now I may 
stammer in the genesis of this last, but no matter ; I 
must wait for it. The thought must come up before I 
can believe about it ; and when it has come up, I no 
longer need a Regulative Faith, but I get my belief 
precisely where I get my knowledge. 



Chap. XVI.] No Intuitive Beliefs. 137 

III. Nor will it weaken my point the least if I go 
through the five proofs, and diffuse my argumentation 
through every one of them. 

1. It is said in the first place that I am conscious 'of 
Intuitive Beliefs. What does that mean? Does it 
mean that I am conscious of a Regulative Faculty ? 
Hardly. It means that I am conscious of an exercise 
that points to the possession of such an original gift. 
What is that exercise? The exercise of believing is, 
of course, beyond all manner of question, simple belief. 
Now, as we showed, consciousness never gets beyond 
the contents of consciousness. What I intuitively 
know is sheerly the sum of the soul's perceiving. But 
there has always been an attempt like this, — viz. to 
project the consciousness ; to confess what seems to be 
plain, that we are conscious only that we are conscious, 
but that mne of our conscious perceivings is, that we 
look beyond our consciousness, and that we see things, 
or, to take shelter in a fog, that we believe things, that 
are beyond the contents of our consciousness : that 
this is the very thing we are conscious of. But now, 
like the plunger of a pump, the inquiry eternally fol- 
lows, What is that we believe in? Sir William Ham- 
ilton confesses everything. " We can[not] be conscious 
of an act without being conscious of the object to 
which that act is relative" (Lect. xii. p. 147). But 
as Kantians differ, and bewilderedly refuse to follow 
any one leader, we will urge what all agree in in the 
second proof. They are forced to admit an object ; 
and it is some knowledge of the object that is the 
ground for their belief under the second argumen- 
tation. 

2. Now, what is that object ? 

The actualness with which I believe in the external 



138 Logic. [Book II. 

world is the ground for that scoff, — How can I build 
Cheops with soap-bubbles? Consciousness being an 
evanescent dream, how, if I know no more than con- 
sciousness, can I transmute that into granite ? Of 
course I have a right to ask, What is granite ? It is a 
difficulty that the vernunft men will have to meet. 
How idle to triumph over me, and say, I have dropped 
out the very universe, and, when I turn to be taught, 
find no universe ; for undoubtedly Hamilton is right, 
that to be conscious that I believe I must be conscious 
of the object of the belief, so far at least as to have 
some idea. 

3. And to make that plainer yet, let us go to the 
still grosser attitude of proof. There is a universe, is 
there -not ? Now, no matter for the belief. The object 
of these men is to press the issue of faith or scepticism. 
Let us not bother about beliefs. Such is their posi- 
tion. Is there not a cosmos ? If there is, everything 
is manifest ; for consciousness is not being ; and to get 
intimations of the without, out of consciousness which 
is the within, involves the very saltus of Intuitive 
Beliefs. 

So cosmos, — what is it ? We have seen that names 
take in qualities. A chair takes in yellowness. A 
stove takes in blackness and rotund dinginess and 
shape. I mean that the genesis of thought has carried 
into nouns the properties under which the things dis- 
covered themselves. 

So, of self. It has absorbed consciousness. This, 
which is but of the usage, nevertheless clears the meta- 
physic ; for when I speak of knowing cosmos, I mean 
a thousand qualities in addition to the ens, whatever 
that quiddity may be. When, therefore, I speak of 
knowing cosmos, let it be remembered first of all, that 



Chap. XVI.] No Intuitive Beliefs. 1 39 

I am conscious of those myriad traits which the Dic- 
tionary has actually engulphed in the names of being. 

Of the quiddity which is really in dispute this may 
be said, that it would be an amazing comfort if we 
could philosophize it under some mere believing. Men 
do such things. Lecturers in many a school relegate 
what they do not understand to some " law of nature." 
And we plead this as a positive objection. There was 
too much need for this doctrine. The mortar seems to 
have gone in because there lacked a stone. If the 
ghost could have risen unbidden, instead of in the 
creak and shuffle of the scenes, it would have inspired 
more faith. As it is, it is the very necessity of the 
belief, though in a sense grosser than that pleaded 
by Leibnitz, that becomes prima facie an occasion 
of misgiving. 

That apart, however. 

The paring down to the very quiddity itself, helps 
us ; for it clears the question, — What is it that you dis- 
tinctly believe ? If I believe so consciously in matter 
as to make it atheism to deny the faculty, of course I 
must live up to so much boldness, and be able to show 
my neighbors what it is that I so consciously believe. 

You may say, I do not know the ding an sick, but 
I know the ding. Well, what is the ding f In other 
words, we can force the Kantian to say what he believes. 
If he believes, he knows what he believes. If he does 
not know, he is trifling with us. If he knows what he 
believes, how did he find it out ? Let him set that into 
the light, and there will be no need of a doctrine of 
original convictions. 

4. But rallying to another point, he says, — what if 
he did know, that would not compass the doctrine of 
Leibnitzian necessity. He has in fact abnegated this. 



140 Logic. [Book II. 

For if he refuses to tell what he believes, its necessity 
or non-necessity are not a question. Still let us do all 
we can. Let us call the unknown quiddity, x. Now he 
says, if I had seen x a thousand times, that would not 
pronounce it necessary. This is the celebrated doctrine. 
If I had seen a sun-rise a thousand times, that would not 
reach the Leibnitzian affirmance, for it does not grow 
of repetition. But if I see an effect once, presto I aver a 
cause. Here is the triumph. I see the heavens blue 
from infancy to age ; but if I woke up to-morrow, and 
saw them green, I could not complain. They are alike 
experiences. But cause, — that is a different matter. 
And so of substance. Suppose I could see substance, 
and it was decked with qualities, that would not make it 
necessary. Were it seven times a day, and seven times 
a day more, nay seventy times a minute, it would not 
begin to become necessary to thought. Where is the 
difference, therefore, — between a sun-rise, which I have 
seen a myriad of times, and a change which I may have 
seen never, and which yet, if I hear of it but once, I 
pronounce determinately to require causation ? Where 
is the difference ? 

Why just nowhere. That is my answer. 

And now it must vie in force with the single argu- 
ment to which we before alluded. 

Let us look at that. 

The argument to which we before alluded was, We 
have none of these Intuitive Beliefs because they give 
us no means of cognizing their objects. Then, if we 
have no means of cognizing their objects, a fortiori 
have we none of cognizing the necessity of their 
objects ; and this will appear on independent trial. 

Let it be understood, we utterly deny any Leibnitz- 
ian necessity. If I see Orion a million of times, I do 



Chap. XVI.] No Intuitive Beliefs. 141 

not say, Orion must necessarily have his belt ; for I 
may wake up at midnight, and the belt may be no 
longer in the heavens. This therefore with most 
people is no Leibnitzian belief. But so it is in respect 
to effects. If I had seen an effect no oftener than I 
had seen Orion, my conviction would be the same. 
Effect is a mere experience. The thought that it looks 
for a cause by a congenital belief, is an absurd and 
impossible figment. It looks for a cause by every 
imaginable experience. And if any one says, Experi- 
ence never can be total, I answer, Nor is the convic- 
tion. I deny that a jet of being is unthinkable. That 
bread should suddenly start up ; that a loaf should 
spring upon my table ; that rocks should rise upon 
my field, — are not things that my mind has visions 
about one way or the other. It has a mighty experi- 
ence that such things cannot happen ; but sheerly 
that they cannot, by the force of any native power to 
know,— I deny that there is any such consciousness. 
If any one presses the fact, it must be discrimen 
simplex between his mind and me. I have no such 
consciousness. In fact, to have consciousnesses they 
must be conscious facts. And to have facts, they 
must be conscious pictures in my experience. 

But, to carry the war into Africa ; how do you 
dispose of God ? Is not He an effect ? You say, No ; 
an effect is that which is caused. O, then, I grant the 
truth of your proposition. Everything that is caused 
is caused ; that of course. But if in effects we can 
include the greatest of all existences, viz. the Almighty, 
then of two things one ; either the mind is a nice theo- 
logical sense fixing God in His niche by an innate 
detection of His history; taking the most complex of 
all results, viz. the detection of such a Power, and 



142 Logic. [Book II. 

finding the mind prepared for it by unexampled and 
immediate exceptions, or else God Himself and all 
His creatures are just matters of experience, and the 
laws of one and the laws of the other rise upon us 
just as they do rise, simply as a fact both revealed 
and experienced. 

But says one, provoked by such folly, is there no 
necessary truth ? And how does man ever discover 
it ? Take the case that two and two make four, can 
experience teach it ? Things that are equal to the 
same thing are equal to each other ? Suppose we had 
seen that since we were born, would that be needful, 
or would that be competent, to explain it or to show 
it to be necessary ? And how absurd, therefore, this 
empirical conceit, when all men in all ages have seen 
deeper than their sight, and more than the mere 
pictures of their phenomenal experience. 

Now, here is a mixture to which we have already 
alluded. Philosophy has played false, and by a fresh 
shuffle has thrown in a new trick of conscious appear- 
ances. 

They are not experiences. They are not the other 
thing. They are not one thing or the other as to hav- 
ing any philosophic pith or any bearing whatever upon 
the things at issue. They are mere truisms. And the 
slight is, to take things, of course intuitive, but which 
mean no more than blue is blue, or than joy is pleasant, 
and, because they are intuitive, to huddle them in 
incontinently among these other propositions. That 
the whole is greater than its part, means nothing more 
than that it is what it is. And to make that tally with 
every effect having a cause, is to bring live ducks down 
from the heavens by the plain wooden things that we 
throw as a decoy into the water. 



Chap. XVI.] No Intuitive Beliefs. 143 

The proposition, Things that are equal to the 
same thing are equal to each other, means simply 
that they are equal to the same thing, or simply 
that they are equal. 

So that we might formally announce that the truths 
said to be original are of two classes, one simply of 
experience, such as that every effect must have a cause, 
and the other simply identical, as that black is not 
white, or that it is impossible for the same thing to be 
and not to be. Unquestionably these quite identical 
things require an original gift ; but it is the same gift 
that it requires to see green to be green, or to see 
round to be not square, viz. the gift that it requires 
originally to see green or round. 

4. The fourth argument, — that experience could 
never decide upon universalis, is still easier to dispose 
of: — Neither could an original belief. In fact this 
mark of universality is mere rubbish after Leibnitz 
introduced the doctrine of necessity. The mark of 
universality is not one that men dream of contemplat- 
ing in itself. The plea is : necessary, and therefore 
universal. All necessary truth is universal because it 
is necessary. All universal truth is necessary because 
it is necessary. Necessity, therefore, is all the mark. 
And universality, that is, universality in time, or uni- 
versality in space, is not a thing that the mind can 
compass in itself, but can only dream of as inferred 
from its necessity. Necessity, therefore, is the only 
mark of original truths. 

Now, distinctly, we admit necessity in the instance 
of two and two are four, and John and Robert are not 
Jim ; and therefore we admit these truths to be uni- 
versal. We profess to believe, and that originally, that 
it will always come out that way. For, though we have 



144 Logic. [Book II. 

not seen all the Jims and all the Roberts, yet there is 
a necessity for our belief, and that simply on the 
ground that Jim is Jim, and Robert Bob. But that I 
have an innate belief that cause is necessary, and an 
innate belief that substance is necessary, and an innate 
incompetence to imagine a rock or a loaf as possessed 
of neither ; that my m'ind originally evicts all possibil- 
ity of phenomena without substance, and all possibility 
of a rock without origin just looming into space, are 
dogmas that we utterly deny. The mind has no rock 
and no loaf as an understood phenomenon at any rate. 
And when Sir William Hamilton perfectly revolution- 
izes the whole, and says our original belief is not an 
old fashioned thought of cause, but some Hamiltonian 
one that he would substitute, he 'shows how arbitrary 
is the whole conception. The mind, according to 
him, has an original belief in the sameness of the sum 
of being! that there goes out of the cause just as 
much as is lodged in the effect ! and a whole parcel of 
other aphorisms, which are just as much true of the 
mind as that it is born with an original conviction of 
the proper length and breadth and thickness of a brick, 
or that it was born with an original norm as to whether 
there were nut-galls in the hand-writing upon the 
wall, or as to whether there were carbon in the angels 
at Joseph's tomb. 

All this about necessity is absurd ; and the way its 
advocates vary when they come to the categories of 
belief, shows that it is an unsound induction. Cause, 
like blue or green, is a thing that we have merely 
observed. If all things were blue, there are men that 
would enter it among the elements of thought. And 
if, as in the instance of cause, it could be predicated of 
the spiritual world, there would be men to argue that 



Chap. XVII.] Intuitive Beliefs Unnecessary. 145 

the creation required blue, or, perhaps, the Almighty 
required blue, and that we were born with that ele- 
mental belief. 

For though I hold that no event, other than the 
continued existence of God, ever did happen without 
an adequate cause, I hold so from no native belief 
(particularly, as my very thought of cause is patched 
and imperfect and variously put together), but from an 
absolutely entire experience, which has had positively 
no exception ; and from what I have known of cause ; 
and from what I have seen of the requirements of its 
nature. In stating this in the next chapter we shall 
complete our adverse argument. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

THE DOCTRINE OF INTUITIVE BELIEFS NOT NECESSARY FOR PURPOSES 
OF EXPLANATION. 

I. If we go forward into a system of Ontology 
(Book III.) which shows distinctly how the idea 
of being could originate,' this, if it say nothing of In- 
tuitive Beliefs, must explode them better than any 
other argument. We might omit this chapter, there- 
fore, and trust for its results to the whole that is to 
follow. 

II. Again ; the argument behind us! If the " Be- 
liefs " we are instructed to imagine are-not efficient, in 
that case too they are not necessary. The excursive 
leap, the saltus from the within to the without, may be 
ever so much vital, still if the Regulative Faculty will 
not make it, it is not the faculty that is needed. Here, 
therefore, we might pause also. A man's leg might 
have to be cut off; but if a knife is without an edge, 
that knife at least is not necessary. This chapter, 

7 



146 Logic. [Book II. 

therefore, is really superfluous, if we are punctual and 
complete in the rest of the argumentation. 

III. But error is impatient. It settles itself in long 
dynasties. If error is prescriptive ; if it has held the 
best minds of the world ; if it has struck its roots into 
letters, and, what is more than that, if it has got itself 
ennobled as one with the religions of men, we must 
not wait for the leisure of our demonstration. The 
waters may burst a pipe, which, if they would wait, 
might be sufficient to carry them off. We must reply 
to the first gusts of displeasure. And here are two of 
them, — first that it is imprudent to cry, Nay, to some 
power which the world has certainly found to carry us 
from the phenomenal to the real ; and, second, most 
especially impudent, when, not only as fact, but as de- 
monstration, we have not dreamed of any knowledge 
of the real from what is phenomenal alone. 

Let us look at this. 

1. The world is certainly carried from the phenom- 
enal to the real. There is that much of preascertained 
argument. Now grant, it may be said, that Intuitive 
Beliefs are hazily exhibited ; still, there must be some- 
thing. Consciousness cannot be being. Conscious- 
ness, if it only sees consciousness, cannot see being ; 
and that it does see being having been the conviction 
of our race, there must be something (better or worse 
in its expounding) that answers to what we have been 
groping after in Intuitive Beliefs. 

This is the first impatiency. 

And the second is like it : — 2. How do you arrive 
at the real ? Demonstrably you cannot, empirically. 
Consciousness is one thing. Being is quite a different 
thing. Let us force admissions as we go. Conscious- 
ness is a perceptive gleam. Self is a real entity. 



Chap. XVII.] Intuitive Beliefs Unnecessary. 147 

Unless there be a gnosis that projects me out of my 
thought, how can I conceive of self? Let us consider 
both impatient appeals to us under one. 

(1) I may say, as belonging to the philology of the 
case, that all men conceive of substance as both phe- 
nomenal and real. A star, even to a philosopher, is 
partly a bright light. This we shall often advert to. 
As an actual fact (I speak now as apart from your 
philosphy) you conceive a chair as yellowness as well 
as scientific substance. In other words you put to- 
gether all you know of it, and, phenomenal as well as 
real, the whole bundle you. call a chair. And so of 
self. It is not the scientific ens ; above all, it is not 
the Pantheistic Power : indeed, it is not the veritable 
I, — but it is the consciousness and that. Or rather, to 
utter the real philosophic fact, the veritable I, as we 
become entitled to call it by the usages of speech, is 
really, like the yellow chair, the ens AND its qualities. 
The philosopher (the very best) cannot fail to under- 
stand that his conscious meaning for the word self is a 
painted entity ; that is, a ghostly entity with the con- 
sciousness annexed. So then, the very Lexicon enti- 
tling me to be conscious of myself, I must remember 
that carefully, — that I make the trajectory from the 
within to the without first of all by carrying the within 
into the without. This is not important philosophi- 
cally : I mean, except in the way of correcting our 
mistakes. But it shows how error fastens. I really 
see being if yellow color is made a part of it. I really 
see self if consciousness, as with every thinker, sticks 
fast as an ingredient. But the chair aback of the 
yellow color, and the self as the dunamis of thought, 
metaphysically are something different ; and when 



148 Logic. [Book II. 

these are in the case, Intuitive Beliefs are the things 
dispatched to go and fetch them. 

Here comes the appeal, — ' How do you empirical 
men dream of these hidden entities? You believe in 
God. Did you ever see Him ? You believe in cause. 
Do you comprehend the whole of it ? Nay, do you 
perceive the least of it ? If " Intuitive Beliefs " are to 
be exploded just to the extent that we cannot conceive 
their subjects, how are any beliefs to flourish outside 
of actual perception ? ' 

Now, there is the very point. The doctrine of 
this treatise is that no belief is to flourish outside of 
positive consciousness. 

There is nothing consciously in the mind but 
Perception. 

There is nothing intuitively known but Perceptions. 

There is nothing consciously believed, except either 
first what I consciously introspect, and that I prefer to 
call knowledge, or secondly, as a part of this, so much 
of what I consciously introspect as is uncertain, and 
whose uncertainty can be measured in my conscious- 
ness, and thus become the object of probable knowl- 
edge, or what it would have been philosophical to call, 
simply belief. 

The uncertainty of doves being alike has formerly 
been instanced. That they are alike is probable ; that 
they are unlike is probable. The probability is present 
to my consciousness. So now (what is wider in its em- 
pirical range), the uncertainty that an order, if it is 
once observed, will be observed repeatedly. The un- 
certainty is empirical ; the uncertainty is conscious. 
Here it is that the two theatres come together. It is 
the same with cause ; only in the instance of cause the 
uncertainty is so diminished by the effect of repetition 



Chap. XVII.] Intuitive Beliefs Unnecessary. 149 

that the empiricism answers all the ends of positive 
and certain knowledge. 

Carry this into theology. 

I cannot see God, but I trace Him in an order here- 
after to be explained. I cannot trace Him wholly, but 
so as I fail to trace, it is absurd to say that I believe. 
I believe more than I know, but I believe it nakedly in 
that shape, that there is something more than I know ; 
and I believe that for conscious cause. I believe 
all the analogies I trace, just as I believe the ears and 
the head of the cow standing in the gate ; * nay, I be- 
lieve the ears and the head where I know it cannot be 
a cow, and that they are head and ears that I cannot 
entirely shape or conceive in my expectation. So I 
believe in God like a man, because I trace him through 
man's nature. I believe in God different from man, be- 
cause I trace the need of difference. I believe in God 
higher and holier and something altogether beyond 
man, for that I have traced in the analogy of Nature.f 
And yet beyond the fact of this beyondness, that is, 
beyond the fact of more and wider, and this beyondness 
itself a dictum of solid orders already traced, I believe 
in nothing for which I have not an experienced reason. 
And, therefore, I believe in God no further nor other 
than in the way I know Him. 

And so of Cause. I believe in Cause; and why? 
Because I have some idea of it ? % But do I believe no 
further ? No. Except just in that shape : I do believe 
FURTHER. That is, from the very amplest tracings of 
analogy I believe there is more in cause than I am 
able to uncover. If you retort and say, Why hot let 

* See B. 2, chap. x. 

f That is, as we shall see hereafter in the " Order of Perception." 

% See Ontology 



150 . Logic. [Book II. 

us have this ulterior belief? I say, For the want of 
grounds for it. I base this thought of more upon trains 
of consciousness, lhave this thought of more. Where- 
as in your case you have absolutely nothing. By your 
own anterior reasoning you believe that of which you 
have no idea. 

(2.) To come back to a more distinct answer to 
what has been asked, we take the leap to being by its 
ANALOGY with what we have seen in our consciousness. 
We will trace this in the Book that follows. 

(3.) And, last of all, we add to it by the idea of 
MORE. This itself is a dictum of analogy. We have 
no intuitive belief that there are phenomena and more, 
but we have an experienced discovery that there are 
analogies traceable without ; and that these tra'ce still 
further analogies, and these further (dependent on the 
uniformity of nature), and these further still ; till like 
the x. y. z. in an equation, the color fades out, and the 
result that our empiricism holds, is rather the counter 
for a thought, than any distinct self-conscious idea. 

This, which we can now but faintly trace, will more 
distinctly appear under the head of Ontology. 



BOOK III. 

ONTOLOGY; 

OR, THE 

SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS THE 
KNOWLEDGE OF BEING. 



CHAPTER I. 

ONTOLOGY UNDER THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY. 

ONTOLOGY is the Science of Being. Being is either 
self or not-self. The doctrine of Psychology is, that 
there is nothing consciously in the mind but perception. 
If there is nothing consciously in the mind but percep- 
tion, then self and not-self are perception, or they are 
not consciously in the mind. 

If any one says, There is nothing consciously in our 
minds but perception, but perception of being is one 
of our conscious perceptions and therefore we are 
conscious of being, we turn to our former arguments. 
The whole of perception is consciousness, and the 
whole of consciousness is perception. If the whole 
of perception is consciousness, then we do not perceive 
being unless the self or the not-self is throughout a 
consciousness, because moreover on the other hand 
the whole of consciousness is perception, and if the 
whole of consciousness is perception, then we are not 
conscious of being, unless the whole of being is a 
mere perceiving. 



152 Ontology [Book TIL 

Unless a part of being is perceiving, therefore, we 
are in no part conscious of either self or not-self. 



CHAPTER II. 

ONTOLOGY UNDER THE LIGHT OF LOGIC. 

THE doctrine of Logic is, that there is nothing 
intuitively known but perception. If there is nothing 
intuitively known but perception, then being is percep- 
tion, or it is not intuitively known. 

There are men who believe that we are conscious 
of all of self; for they imagine that self is a unit, and 
when I put my hand upon a stove, they believe that 
the feeling of warmth is a consciousness of myself as 
feeling it. But there are no men who believe that I 
am conscious of all of a not-self. 

I see a peach. 

No one dreams that I see all of the peach, or that 
I see all of any part of it. I do not see or hear or taste 
or smell or take-in any even phantom of the peach, 
except a mere superficies of color. Even that I can 
divide, — because the very word color means an impres- 
sion upon my sense, or it means a pigment upon the 
peach. Now, press any one to his last results, and he 
will confess, that, if he is conscious of the peach, he is 
conscious only of a part of it, and that that part con- 
sists only of this light upon the sense, and hence that 
this light must be the peach or that it cannot be said 
to be intuitively known. 

Now, is this light the peach ? 

I may have been delivering an answer which has 
surprised the pure metaphysician when I have said 
that it is. 

Our first impulse was to say that it was not, or 



Chap. II.] under the Light of Logic. 153 

rather to say, that the peach of the scholar, and above 
all, the peach of the Christian, was different from the 
peach of the peasant, and proved itself empirical by 
the different versions given at different stages of empir- 
ical development : for example, that the peach of the 
peasant was little more than qualities : and so of self, — 
that the self of the peasant was little more than con- 
sciousness : and then I meant to advance upon our 
learning: the scholar looking deeper; the theist far 
deeper still. 

But when I came to consider, language asserted a 
far different signification. Language stood with the 
peasant. 

The simple eye of a peasant-race looking out upon 
the world had seen being with its qualities. The idea 
had become conglomerate. They had seen self with 
its consciousness. They had never separated them. 
And I hardly mean that the peasant-man got the start 
in our vernacular : for the scholar finds it convenient 
also. Who ever dreams of substance pure ? And this 
is no mean fact to bring out in our Ontology ; for that 
which has the right of names has the correctness of 
aphoristic statement. If being includes qualities, and 
if, when I speak of self, I include consciousness, then 
of course, as a mere statement out of the Lexicon, I 
am conscious of self, just as far as the working name 
of self includes an ephemeral consciousness. 

But then, see ! This may be quite important to 
explain, — but it is not important to deep investigation. 
There is a scholar's self, and, moreover, deeper still, 
there is a Christian's self. Ab extra, there is a scholar's 
peach, and a Christian's or a theist's peach. I care 
not a particle whether they are ever called by the 
name; and I know they never are. The conscious self 

7* 



154 Ontology. [Book III. 

and the purple peach have long ago got possession of 
the words. 

But there is a metaphysical reality, viz. the ens 
without the quality. It is either I or not-I. We 
might call it this name or that name. The name does 
not interfere with the reality. It is in self what is 
thought of as the unconscious mind. It is in matter 
what is philosophized about as substance. It is this 
which under the light of Logic is by clear demonstra- 
tion not a consciousness ; is, therefore, not perceived ; 
is not intuitively known ; being, therefore, not cer- 
tainly demonstrated ; but left to be inferred ; and 
opening the whole field of empirical investigation. 

CHAPTER III. 

HOW COULD PERCEPTION BEGIN? 

PERCEPTION could only begin by a sensation.* 
If any man thinks differently, let us proceed induc- 
tively and ask for that other perception than a sen- 
sation with which a man's perceiving might consciously 
begin. 

Let us suppose Adam just born, or a man swept, as 
to his past thinking, by an entire oblivion ; and let the 
statement be of some thought, other than a sensation, 
that might set on foot the conscious current. Suggest 
any. Nay, even dimly describe the mere ghost of an 
idea that could be obtained for such a beginning of 
perception. 

* Sensation has not been treated of yet ; but Metaphysics is an inter- 
lapping scheme ; and a system cannot be promulged without anticipating 
some of its parts. Sensation is enough known popularly to meet our 
purpose ; we have already been obliged to allude to it, in ways, however, 
requiring no assent except what all will give to its general idea. 



Chap, ill.] How Could Perception Begin ? 155 

The reply that might come back upon us would 
be, that we might be conscious of self. But think ! 
how could we be conscious of self, without some 
conscious perception ? And if any one promptly re- 
plies, Why, the conscious perception is a conscious 
perception of self, we beg to get him ready for dealing 
fairly with his position by certain plain reminders. 
The self that he is to suppose conscious ab initio of it- 
self, is a self by agreement destitute of all sensation. 
It is not clothed in flesh ; or, if clothed in flesh, it is to 
be destitute for the moment of all sense-consciousness. 
If the Adam is sitting on the ground, he is to be un- 
conscious of any pressure by reason of weight, or of 
any glow of muscular sensibility. His flesh-sense all 
over him is to be for the moment dead. He can have 
no recurrent thoughts ; for he has had, up to this first 
thought, of course, none to recur. Now give me some 
idea of self that a man may have before any sense or 
any desire or any perception other than of self itself 
has intervened to give the scaffold on which the idea 
of self may climb into his view. 

Asking how angels manage is a mere inter pellatio 
difficult ate. Angels are not men. They may begin 
with sensations just as we do ; getting them from mat- 
ter without a body, as we do, with a body ; moving 
matter without a body, as we move it with a body. I 
do not say that sensation is necessary to thought, but 
that God has chosen that ours shall begin with it, and 
that men, who are to sit as kings, shall have their dwell- 
ing in the dust, and, like a child's kite, are to be tied to 
to it as their only chance of rising consciously to some- 
thing higher. 



156 07ttology. [Book III. 

CHAPTER IV. 

PERCEPTION NOT IN A CURRENT NO COGNITION OF BEING. 

PERCEPTION not in a current is perception nakedly 
by itself. Perception in a current is so uniformly our 
experience of perceiving, that we asked the question 
how perception could begin, that we might look at one 
perception in its most naked and original isolation. 
But we may conceive of it in any way. All we ask is, 
the simplest possible perception. 

And let us think of one. Let a man lie upon a 
tower, and get a glare of sky, with no sight of anything 
beside. Or, to make it simpler, take a probe, and 
touch an optic nerve, and give the idea of blue. Or 
let it be an odor, or, if you choose, a harp-note. All 
that we ask is that it be single. The body is to lie 
dead, and the mind is to have no recurrence from the 
past. The blue glare is to be all, and we are to treat 
it as it first spreads upon the sense. I am conscious 
in thatgleam of no idea of being. 

I cannot demonstrate what I say ; for, when I have 
seized the thing, and held it up in this very delicate 
segregation, each man must judge for himself. But 
let any one who cannot submit, tell his own story, and 
say what consciously happens. Being is either self or 
not-self. Does the blue gleam give the idea of self? 
or does it give the idea of not-self? or does it give the 
idea of both ? If it gives the idea of self, it gives two 
ideas. It gives the idea of self and one articulately 
different, viz. the blue gleam. Now, is it consciously 
anything but the blue vision ? If it give the idea of 
not-self, then the glare upon the nerve and something 
else than the glare upon the nerve are distinctly to be 



Chap. IV.] No Current, 7to Ontology. 157 

made different. Can consciousness do this? Shut 
a man off from everything else, and give him just 
a simple color. Can that thrill upon the nerve be 
translated into anything but itself? And if being be 
considered as both self and not-self, can that instant 
of his fragrant sense divide itself, like a triple ring, 
into three ideas, and without any suggestion from the 
past to give shape or number to his consciousness, can 
that one smell have a threefold discrepance, or indeed 
any possible plurality whatever ? 

'Yes/ a man may say, 'it has plenty.' (For now 
mark the thing that misleads us.) ' When all our 
experience matures we see the tell-tale sense on both 
ideas. Take men consciously as they are, and let the 
odor come in the midst of our natural experience, and 
we see the odor on both self and not-self. How did 
it get there ? Not troubling ourselves with an attempt 
•at forced simplicity, our thinking, naturally, as it comes, 
shows the odor on both self and not-self. Now, if it 
gets there at all, why may we not suppose it to have 
been dual at the beginning ? And why are we not 
forced to feel that the blueness, if it appear in both 
self and not-self now, did not originally appear so, as it 
is unchanged in its relation to our being ? ' 

Now, this will help us very much toward our own 
particular discriminations. 

Blueness appears in both self and not-self, because 
both are highly complex ideas, and sensation is found 
as a part of either. I did not say, sensation is not con- 
cerned in exhibiting being; but shall teach the contrary. 
I did not say, sensation in a current is not called being, 
and that inveterately ; I have said the opposite. I only 
averred that the moment that the current starts, the 
gleam that begins is nakedly itself. It is not I ; it is 



158 Ontology. [Book III. 

not Not-I. It is a whiff of fragrant delight, that is 
exhibitive not at all of either. And if it wear a tell- 
tale look as it rides afterward upon both, it only helps 
to show how the idea of being is made up. There is 
nothing intuitively known but perception. If, there- 
fore, being is intuitively known, it must be perception. 
If it be in part intuitively known, that part must be 
consciously perception. If any part of it be not intui- 
tively known, that part of it must be empirically dis- 
covered. This is the genesis of ontological thought. 
And, therefore, the riding on the idea, at the time, of a 
present consciousness like a blue vision only expounds 
the conscious reality. The blue gleam may come to 
be noticeable in both self and not-self; but that does 
not show that it would be the least of either, if, as an 
isolated gleam, it had just arisen. 

' Nay ! ' the retort will come, ' you have missed the 
argument.' And there is a point in the case that we' 
are now ready to consider. If there be possibilities in 
a single gleam to enable it to appear at any stage of 
the current in both self and not self, how can it be said 
that that one gleam has no duality in the beginning? 
If in its original rise it was not subjective and objective 
in its very nature as a gleam, how can it become so in 
any stage of our experience ? The I and the Not-I are 
unquestionably two : how can the gleam, if indivisibly 
one, appear in both of them ? Is not a sense of Ego 
and a sense objective to the sense a sense thus con- 
sciously inferred in the most isolated and original 
sensation ? 

Now our whole Book will be an answer to this in 
its successive chapters. Suffice it now that we chal- 
lenge the boldest consciousness to see any duality in a 
gleam. We claim it as originally one. How it appears 



Chap, v.] No Order, no Ontology. 159 

experimentally two it is fair to treat as a question when 
the subsequent consciousnesses come in. The bold 
denunciation of its doing so, as of necessity absurd, 
we may, however, roughly reply to by a case in 
mathematics. Is not a point one ? With the utmost 
compass of invention can I impart to it any duality? 
Let it alone, and it is one individual unrevealing point. 
But I move it, and it traces a line. Or I let it alone 
and draw a line through it, and it appears in that line. 
Then I draw another line through it, and it appears in 
that. Does that make it originally two ? Metaphysics 
can have but little light shed upon it by such mathe- 
matical conceits. But still, till we get on into the 
facts, it is enough to serve as a breakwater to hold 
back the attack. The point appears in the two lines, 
and the gleam appears in the two beings, for precisely 
similar reasons. If the point began the two lines, it 
would be in both because they start there, and if the 
gleam began the me and the not-me, it would be in 
both because they start in it. The sense that is con- 
sciously present is the starting gleam of both varie- 
ties of being. 

CHAPTER V. 

PERCEPTION NOT IN AN ORDERLY CURRENT NO COGNITION OF BEING. 

If perception not in a current could be no cogni- 
tion of being, perception not in an orderly current 
could not be such a cognition. 

Perception not in an orderly current is hard to 
think of, if that want of order is to be entire. A 
building that falls into ruin is not an indistinguishable 
heap. The maddest maniac has some harmony in his 
continual perceivings. 

But let us suppose perception banished of all its 



160 Ontology. [Book III. 

laws. Suppose it to be not Incessant : then an irrup- 
tion of gleams would be no better than one single one, 
in which we saw there could be no idea of being. 
Suppose it not Transient, and also not Recurrent, and 
also not Associated, or, as we explain it, not marshalled 
forth by the law of the Strongest Emotion. Suppose 
it to be utter jungle, and that, with no continuous 
influences to chain my consciousnesses together : we 
defy any man to think of any other result in Ontology 
than would arise from one gleam. 

If there be no leaping memory, or power to cog- 
nize the past, passed objects must be orderly mapped 
to see them in their position, and present objects must 
be orderly mapped. If, therefore, our original positions 
are correct, we are following what necessarily results 
when we say, that if one gleam can give us no onto- 
logical thought, ten million cannot, if they are break- 
ing around us like sparks with no harmony and no 
memory together. 

CHAPTER VI. 

PERCEPTION IN A CURRENT OF BUT ONE ORDER NOT A COGNITION 
OF BEING. 

If perception not in an orderly current can give 
no idea of being, perception in a current of but one 
order can never give it. 

This may excite surprise. 

We speak with reserve too, because we are imagin- 
ing an impossibility. 

Perception with but one order could never begin. 

The order of perception traceable to the laws we 
have noticed could not begin except with another 
order, and the reason will be found to be, because 
perception cannot begin without a sensation. 



Chap. VII.] Two Orders of Perception. 161 

It will be better for us, however, to explain at once 
these two orders. How one would be barren will 
appear more definitely when we come to describe the 
fecundity of the two. And that one cannot start by 
itself need not really interfere with the conviction that, 
if it could, it could not be prolific. The fecundity of 
ontological thought is due to the duality in our train of 
consciousness. 

CHAPTER VII. 

TWO ORDERS OF PERCEPTION. 

I LOOK off from the top of an unsheltered tower 
and see nothing but a blue glare. We have used that 
place because it helps us to conceive of the simplest 
possible sensation. 

But, really, one sensation is never by itself. The 
eye looks out from a body all full of nerve sense. If I 
were bound upon my back, and held fast to that single 
vision, other consciousnesses would break in. Sounds 
would steal up ; or at least pressures upon every limb, 
or general sensations of my flesh, would rise to my 
thought, even if this had been the very beginning of 
my being. 

Of course then the current would set out. Just as 
through all eternity, the first thought would fade, and 
the next would weave to it by the law of the Strongest 
Emotion. Now, a child can see that two harmonies 
would begin at once. 

There would be but one current. Nothing through 
an eternal age would lie outside of that linear unity — 
I mean nothing conscious ; but in that consciousness 
of mine would be immediately revealed two accreting 
harmonies, (i) Thought would go on, harmonious 
through the law of the Strongest Emotion, and yet (2) 



1 62 Ontology. [Book III. 

with pieces of harmony supplied otherwise, such as the 
harmony of Orion's belt, or such as the harmony 
between sensation and recurrence. 

It matters not now to say how. We are seizing a 
fact. The fact is beyond all cavil, that the man with 
the azure glare starts from that simple point, and there 
accretes to it two orders, an order of the strongest 
emotion, and an order bred otherwise, that is an order 
forced upon his eye in ways not wholly by the laws of 
thinking. 

These orders are immense, — the one for all time, 
and the other for all space and for all the reaches of 
possible recurrence. 

And yet how simple they are ! 

A little baby wakes to the beginning of thought. 
A cherry hangs before him. There is a harp in the 
casement, and a fragrance from a vase of flowers. His 
little thought begins to travel. It instantly gathers 
two separable arrays. He looks at the cherry, and 
afterwards returns to it. He hears the harp, and after- 
wards hears it again. He smells the flowers, and has a 
sense of them a hundred times afterward. All is very 
dreamy yet, but two orders are waking in the single 
current. One is leading him from harp to cherry and 
from cherry to the fragrance of flowers, and regaling 
him by variegated thought, and feasting him by its 
calm continuance. The other is the order of the room. 
But we must be careful about such matured thought. 
What does the baby know about the order of the 
room? The order of the room is a high empirical dis- 
covery. The embryo of the order of the room is an 
order of analogy. If the baby saw novelties every 
time, the cherry and then a lamp and then a fire-fly and 
then the moon and then its mother, and moreover had 



Chap. VII.] Two Orders of Perception. 163 

no remembrance, but spun an eternal line with no 
analogies, the fact would be entirely different ; but he 
sees the cherry and sees the cherry again ; he hears 
the harp and hears it afterward ; there is a room-full 
of analogies that recur. They are not the same things 
at all, but the like. The harp-note is not the same 
sound, but a totally different sound made by new 
undulations. And the cherry not the same light, but 
a totally different light that left the lamp after the 
other. Still, as the absolute reality with the child, he 
sees things LIKE. He would not know that fact but 
for the fact of recurrence ; but, as we have already 
explained, sensation recurs. The new sight fits down 
upon an old recurrence. The child has not gotten 
over grasping at the moon ; but in his eye (for it is 
too soon yet to speak of it as in the room,) he sees old 
faces. Analogy is his very earliest life. There are 
two orders, the order of emotional thought and the 
order of recurred analogy. 

And so the man upon the tower. Suppose Lethe 
blotted out the past. Starting from a point if you 
please, viz. one blue gleam, two orders like two lines 
emerging from a point would begin at once to travel. 
They will never be young again, not even through all 
eternity ; but will fill themselves with endless maze ; one 
the order of continuous thought, and the other the 
order of observed analogy ; * one the emotional line of 
remembered consciousness, and the other the emotional 
world of remembered like things; one not all inward, 
for it picks material from without, the other not all 
outward, for it blends its pictures with what is within ; 

* These are but proximate expressions ; for the order of continuous 
thought is itself also, in another view, the order of observed analogy. 



1 64 Ontology. [Book III. 

in fact neither inward and neither outward, but both 
in the line of thought ; inwardness and outwardness 
being both conscious perceptions, but one order being 
the conscious succession of the current, and the other 
the conscious stability of like recurrences. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ONE ORDER CONTINUOUS IN THE CURRENT, AND PRODUCED WHOLLY 
BY ITS LAWS. 

ONE of the orders in the current of perception is 
unbroken in it (unless we consider sleep as breaking 
it), and is nothing more than the order of association, 
produced in ways that we have already considered. 
The law of the strongest emotion makes it really an 
order, choosing for it agreeable pictures, and making 
it deal in wholes not in fragments, and in groups not 
in monads, and in lines not in glimpses, and in logical 
results not in casualties of no distinguishable interest. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE OTHER ORDER, IN THE CURRENT, BUT NOT CONTINUOUS IN IT, 
NOR PRODUCED WHOLLY BY ITS LAWS. 

To show that there is an order in outward nature 
and an order in inward consciousness ; that is, (to treat 
the case by an easy example) that there is an order in 
a spangled sky and an order in a current of perception, 
— this, which is really an advanced stage of disserta- 
tion, is not our object in these chapters. 

Our object in these chapters is to show that in con- 
scious knowledge, that is, in perception this moment as 
it may arise, I discern two orders, an order continuous 



Chap. IX.] The Other Order not Continuous. 165 

in the current, and an order in the current but not 
continuous. 

The order continuous in the current is what I may 
perceive by present sense, or any other" present per- 
ception, with what I see redoubled upon it in the 
way of recurrence. For example, as a harp-note slides 
along (and it must not be forgotten that perception 
before it fades is consciously continuous) it not only 
weaves into our consciousness from some other thread of 
sight or sound that just preceded it, but what is more, 
it weaves into some other thread just as it fades. 
There is thus trodden a conscious track. Only a cer- 
tain part is conscious at the time, but it may be any 
part. The thread in the region out of which recur- 
rence comes is continuous. It may recur in great 
lengths. It may recur in myriads of ways, and, more 
than that, myriads of times ; reduplicating myriads of 
instances of conviction. At last, no length of it can 
ever recur without reduplicating upon it former con- 
sciousnesses ; till the mind becomes aware of a current ; 
and this is what we mean by saying that there may 
be perception of continuous order at any conscious 
moment in the current. 

But now, my sight of the starry sky brings back 
another starry sky, and lo ! it fits itself upon it ; and 
again, myriads of starry skies. I have shown how 
these years of harmony mat themselves like ferns in 
the coal measure. It looks as though coal were an 
original formation, just as though coal were an origi- 
nal gift. But Orion grows familiar in the sky, just as 
feelings grow familiar in the current, by repetition. 
At any rate (for we need not grow so explicit yet in all 
that we behold), the harmonious heavens can be lost to 
me, so that they are not continuous in the current. A 



1 66 Ontology. [Book III. 

sound can lead me off, or some pain that twitches at 
my knee ; and when I come back again, the heavens 
spread upon my eye, and then another heaven, and 
another, stereoscoped all into one. And then so orderly 
becomes this train, which is not in the current, that it 
covers all space. 

Just as the train continuous recurs from a single 
track, and may report from any part of it, till we 
become satisfied there is but one ; so this train in-con- 
tinuous grows into heaven and earth. It takes in all 
sense. It is found to be perfectly combined. 

" The mountains look on Marathon, 
And Marathon looks on the sea." 

It blends all that is recurrent into one. And as each 
conscious length reports itself backward and forward 
through the current, so, each conscious breadth spreads 
over all that is seen, and finds no break in harmonious 
recurrences. 

Let the reader however grant but this ; we will 
take up other developments as they arise : — There is 
an order each conscious moment in the perceptions 
that we see, as concerns those that weave to them as 
they are passing off, and as concerns those that weave 
to them as they are passing on. There is an order, 
therefore, continuous in the current. And there is an 
order each conscious moment in the sensations that 
we have, not simply that the pictures remain in order 
while they are passing before our mind, but that they 
recur analogously, the old picture and the new picture 
fitting upon themselves, so that Orion's belt (to speak 
of what is a conscious spectacle) recurs as Orion's belt, 
and so that, if the belt recur, we may open our eyes 
and actually fit it upon a new sensation. 

There is an order, therefore, not continuous. 



Chap. X.] A Rudimental Self. 167 



CHAPTER X. 

PERCEPTION IN ITS CONTINUOUS ORDER SELF TILL MORE IS ADDED 

TO IT. 

Now perception in its Continuous Order is Self 
until more is added to it. 

It will be seen that we avoid saying that Self is 
nothing more than perception. We believe the 
contrary. 

But as perception is not even Self in its first simple 
sensation, afterward it is all the Self we see till more is 
added to it. 

We have described a certain track, lengths of which 
are kept in view by every recurrence. That track is 
Self, till other more complicated recurrences and anal- 
ogies come in. 

If you shudder at such a thought, remember that it 
is an error to supply others when the facts already 
noticed supply all the realities thus far in the case. 

For example, I have a certain perception : it is 
bright, clear, and complex. It is conscious of all that it 
perceives. We have already seen that by itself it 
would give us no idea of Self. It is just as bright 
though as if we had had a thousand. Suppose we had 
had a thousand, but leave off for a moment ideas of Body 
and Will that we are afterward to consider. It would 
be seen weaving itself out of a perception past, and lin- 
gering for the company of the perception yet to come. 
This weaving goes on. It is pleasurable. The pleas- 
ure is in a continuous thread. When a pleasure fades 
from consciousness, it goes into the enormous store 
out of which are to travel back innumerable recur- 
rences. They come back conscious of what they were. 



1 68 Ontology. [Book III. 

They fit innumerably upon the new part of the thread. 
Now, knowing, as I do, that God could create me this 
moment, and yet supply me with all these analogous 
recurrences, and, therefore, that the evidence of a past 
self is not intuitive to me like my present consciousness, 
yet I see that this conscious inweaving of recurrences 
would connect the present with the past, and give the 
first idea, that I am to notice, of self as one form of 
being. 

We see, too, how the present thought belongs to 
it. It is the great attaching centre. Past thoughts 
are gone, and are never to come back again. It is the 
present perception of which it is the law that it paints 
itself with the images of the past. It is the present 
perception that is our first self. And it is so rich and 
continuous in its feeling, because those recurrent 
images make it so. To see the invisible God, and to 
see the invisible self, are about equally impossible. And, 
therefore, that neat alphabet of recurrence is what sets 
itself in order, and is about the best news of self that 
perception at its start is instrinsically able to give us. 

CHAPTER XI. 

PERCEPTION IN AN ORDER NOT CONTINUOUS THE NOT-SELF TILL 
MORE IS ADDED TO IT. 

As in one sense we are not conscious of Self, and 
in another sense are conscious of nothing else (because 
it takes all our consciousnesses to arrive at our idea 
of it), so we are conscious and not conscious of 
external being. We wish it to be distinctly under- 
stood that our evidences of Self and Not-self are pre- 
cisely similar. 

I look off from my high tower and see the broad 



Chap. XL] A Rudimental Not-Self. 169 

blue. We have long ago attempted to show that this 
could give no idea of Being. But the first conscious- 
ness, which is a mere light, and which, if it be all my 
consciousness, must be all of myself that I wot of 
in that first moment, soon moves upon its eternal 
journey. The blue gleam from my tower passes into 
a distant harp-note ; that, into a pain in my leg. The 
current starts off upon its track, and it will not be 
long before the baby, even, will find out that the sights 
are to be depended on as alike. The red patch that 
she sees before her eyes, stays; and she has two ways of 
being conscious of it. The patch that she sees before 
her eyes, and that I know to be a cherry, does not 
flash and disappear, but hangs there through the 
moment of her consciousness. She thinks away from 
it to the ivory of your teeth, as you chuckle and 
laugh, and she thinks back to it again perpetually. 
She has the brightest recurrent thoughts. And with- 
out saddling ourselves with all the processes, her con- 
sciousnesses, which are thus early perfect, reveal to 
her by necessary steps those orders in themselves. 

The order in the behavior of the cherry is all she 
knows of it step by step. 

This order will be very slow ; but hastening it, as it 
is all the same, the coldness and the redness and the 
roundness and the smoothness and the hardness and 
all about the cherry can become conscious. How 
such thoughts can become perfect, it need not matter. 
Generically they are all isogonous. They are things in 
consciousness, with one marvellous help, that they all 
agree, and that, from no order in the mind other than 
from that second order that is not continuous. 

Not only does the cherry hang out till recurrence 
touches it again ; but it is a consciousness where sense 



17° Ontology. [Book III. 

is harmonized. I see where I touch, and touch where 
I see, and smell and taste and even hear concordantly ; 
and though these are most advanced modes of expres- 
sion, yet they tell a tale of our very merest conscious- 
ness. The cherry is an assemblage of my sense, and 
that, meeting all in harmony, is a necessary part of 
that baby's actual perception. 

Now, would it do nothing for her in the way of a 
Not-self? Strip off from her all " Perception " in that 
most baseless and modern sense. Conceive of her 
senses as fresh and bright, and that she sees as we do, 
only without experience. Know that she will have that 
track of recurrent consciousness which we have spoken 
of as the first order, and the ranges of heaven and 
earth harmonious and one before her ; let me ask, Will 
she learn nothing? Shut off the idea of Intuitive 
Belief, and say, Will she not see things precisely as she 
does see them? Do we not know that she sees the 
cherry round and red ? Do we not see all her other 
consciousnesses? And, as those consciousnesses are 
in strange harmony, is it too much to ask that where 
those harmonies are the harmonies of the Not-self in 
its appearance to men, that she consciously see them, 
and learn that much of exterior being? 

If we can suppose that that baby can find out in 
the cherry all that is in the most perfect sensation, 
and hold on to her recurrent sights till other sides and 
other phenomena of the fruit have blended themselves 
all together, unquestionably she will have (by help of 
other lessons, too, that she is taking, in other visions) 
a harmonious cluster of sense, which she consciously 
sees; and that I aver is her first idea of being. 

The track of continuous consciousness, therefore, 
initiating a knowledge of Self, is like the breadth of 



Chap. XII.] Effect of the Six Laws. IJl 

harmonies that are not continuous, initiating a knowl- 
edge of Not-self. 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE LAWS OF PERCEPTION, GIVING RISE TO THE CONTINUOUS ORDER, 
GIVE RISE TO THE IDEA OF BEING. 

SUPPOSE there be such a thing as being, apart from 
actual perception, what a special instance of the power, 
wisdom, and goodness of God, to frame the Laws of 
Perception as the only possible occasion by which it 
could be traced ! 

Being must be a shadowy conception, or the finest 
minds would not have been so much at sea. No one 
can doubt the superior intellect of Berkeley. Now, if 
the ideas of being are so singularly plain and simple, 
why all this noise about them ? 

We have shown the nicest arrangement of Percep- 
tions. No one can have read all that has been said 
about original laws without receiving at least a part 
of them. Now, with half of this strangely artificial 
system— Perception as Continuous— Perception as Fad- 
ing—Perception as Recurrent— Perception as Associ- 
ated, and that in interesting forms by the Law of the 
Strongest Emotion— if, with these singularly adapted 
laws, being sheds such a dim light upon the best minds 
that strive to comprehend it, how would it be if these 
laws did not exist ? 

Sensation would be but a passing flash ; or make it 
Continuous, then it would be but a passing glare; or 
make it orderly, who would take note of the order ? 
or make it Recurrent ; unless the laws of perception 
were exactly what they are, there could not be built 
up those two orders of recurrences which the veriest 



1^2 Ontology. [Book III. 

enemy of our system must now admit must have 
something to do with discoveries beyond us. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

SENSATION. 

THERE being nothing consciously in the mind but 
perceptions, and perceptions being endlessly different 
and multiplied, sensations are a certain class of percep- 
tions, that are found to be connected with what we 
call the body. It would be useless, in studying the 
current, to study the nerves and organs by which these 
parts of it are produced. The nerves and organs do 
not show themselves, except empirically, in the consti- 
tution of the current. Neither need we tell all the 
history of what men have thought about sensation. 
Indeed it would be better to exclude all else but the 
current. There are certain perceptions in the current. 
They are very peculiar in their vividness. They are 
our only connection consciously with things around 
us. They are the only start conceivable of thought 
within us. And yet they are but five simple con- 
sciousnesses. A smell and a sound and a taste and a 
sensation of light, and then a corporeal feeling or nerve 
sense of some kind or other, are all the alphabet of 
this amazing and all-including revelation. 

The splendor of philosophy here is that it is so 
conscious. A sound holds itself up before me till I 
hear exactly what I hear. A smell floats till I have 
discerned all of it. I am sure that the consciousness 
in the smell stands perfectly revealed. What my eyes 
take in is but parti-colored light. And what my flesh 
reports is what I am conscious of as felt. This, and 
nothing more, is all that is meant by my sensation. 



Chap. XIV.] Smell. 1 73 

If any one conceived that it was less material than 
this, he errs ; and yet, it is not material at all. A 
sound is a pure perception. If an odor floats upon 
my sense, it is perceptibly a mental consciousness. 
Light is in the current ; so is my zest for good eating. 
If there is anything that goes abroad in my sense, it 
has learned to do so afterward. The beauty of sensa- 
tion is that it is so mental. Light is altogether lighted 
up. Its colors and its shapes and its surfaces are all 
revealed in it. And sensation is so thoroughly among 
our consciousnesses, that it is emotional like all the 
rest, and weighs and judges and compares, like any 
form of possible perception. 

If any one therefore thinks sensation not intelligent, 
let me deal with him specially, as I take up each 
special sensation of the five. 

CHAPTER XIV. 



SMELL is nothing more than what I am conscious 
of in any one familiar instance of the sensation. How 
vain, therefore, to multiply words about it. 

And yet a smell is so intelligent that it grades itself 
with the nicest discrepance. I never have more than 
the first generic scent, if I continue to use my nose 
for ten million of ages : but then, perhaps, all that time 
I never have two odors passing to my brain that do 
not report either in strength or flavor some sort of 
intelligible variation. The mind becomes aware of all 
these differences; but, as the mind is but the name 
for the empirically discovered self, the smell must be 
considered as intelligent,, just as much as any other, iso- 
lated or gregarious, of our perceptions. 



174 Ontology. [Book III. 

We have pleasure in it ; and seek knowledge by it. 
We measure distances and detect objects by their 
smell. It harmonizes with the order not-continuous, 
that grows into that grand creation, the not-self. And 
though it is a simple odor, and never gets-by that 
nerve-state, it is a mighty helper, when it comes to be 
found perfectly at one, in carving out that mighty uni- 
verse without, when it comes to be shaped of these 
endless harmonies. 

CHAPTER XV. 



We would not object if Touch, which is the fifth 
sense, were allowed to embody Taste, which we have 
here numbered as the second sense in the series. 

Touch is a very slack-twisted generalization. Hun- 
ger and sexual delight, — in fact warmth, and different 
sorts of pain, keep but slender company with the usual 
results of touch. 

But, for our purpose, it is all excellent ; and Taste 
might go with them. Metaphysically there is the 
same great lesson. We are conscious of what is dis- 
cernibly felt, and we are conscious of every part of it. 
We are intelligent in all the changes through it. And 
whatever is to be learned of what is consciously re- 
vealed, we learn of course, and we learn alike, in all 
the forms of actual sensation. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

HEARING. 

SOUND does not differ from Smell or Taste. It 
differs entirely from both, if we mean to consider the 



Chap. XVI.] Hearing, 175 

nature of the distinct sensation. It differs so much 
from either, that in the case of a deaf man it is impos- 
sible in its least conception. But in the relation it 
bears to thought, it bears itself identically like all. 
Light does not differ. I have upon my nerve a distin- 
guishable odor. I am conscious of nothing beside. 
But I exclaim with confidence, that there is a dead car- 
cass in the woods. If I am called to give my reason, I 
say, I smell it. Consciously I smell nothing but an 
odor. And while all will admit that the carrion, as the 
cause of it, is only an empirical belief, we refuse to be 
so easily persuaded as to either a sound or a vision. 

I hear a horn away up in yon distant Alp. As a 
sound upon my ear we are slow to treat it as a smell 
upon my nostril. It seems to be up in the hills ; and 
I point to it as the very seat of the sensation. And 
yet how impossible ! The child would hear it' at his 
pillow ; just where he sees the moon. I am sure of the 
triumph of this fact, that noises are mere sensations ; 
that what we learn of them as to place is as we learn 
of odor, a mere experience ; that the Alp-boy in the 
hills is tracked like the nearness of the carrion ; and 
though five million of sounds have been present to my 
sense since the beginning, they may be endlessly dif- 
ferent, and beautifully arranged in their expression, yet 
they are eternally sounds ; generically they are but one 
sensation ; empirically they are the whole of speech, 
but actually they are the pelting of a nerve, which 
returns but one kind of perceivable impression on our 
consciousness. 



176 Ontology. [Book III. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

SIGHT. 

We have been thus particular about Smell and 
Sound, because they introduce us in the happiest way 
to the facts of vision. Here, the odor in the nose and 
the sound on the ear are identical in mentalness with 
the light upon our vision. That peerless sense that 
reveals to us the starry heavens, is nothing more than 
a nerve-sense like the rest, dealing in its own easily dis- 
criminated sensation. The reek that is felt from the 
carrion is isogonous with the lights that are taken from 
the sky. Both are unitary, generically never to be dif- 
ferent. I may see things for a thousand years, and my 
eye will have but a kaleidoscope of lights. If they are 
red and blue, so the smells are good or putrid. If they 
are broad or bright, so are the sounds shrill or constant. 
If they are beautiful and in graceful swells, so are the 
melodies. 1 The neatness of this generical research is 
that it is so perfect ; for sight upon my eye, and sound 
upon mine ear, and smell upon my nose, are incontest- 
ably alike, mere nerve-senses for a thousand years ; 
and yet, so varied, and so delicate, and so conscious, 
that is, intelligent of themselves, and so harmonious, 
that is, reporting in one great system, in which they all 
agree, that though literally but light and odor, they 
combine into a frame which becomes the sum external 
at first of the not-self before our minds. 

If any one points me out qualities that he calls 
Primary and Secondary, I admit them as having dis- 
tinctive traits, but I ask him where is the flaw in these 
pictures of my consciousness? If he says, What I see 
in the light is there where I fix it, and much more 
19 



Chap. XVII.] Sight. 1JJ 

plainly than what I smell in its odors, I do not hesitate 
a moment. Smelling a thing and seeing a thing are 
very distinct indeed in their exactness. One sense 
may be much more useful than another. But, come 
back to where we are flatly conscious. Smell a thou- 
sand years, will it be anything but a smell ? and will it 
not be an act of perfect consciousness ? So gaze for a 
myriad of years, will you get anything consciously but 
light? Will it not be an eye-surface like a bed-quilt 
patched over with colors ? Do you not see the whole 
of it ? And if you do, leave not me absurdly in an error. 
I see nothing all the time but light. Tell me what 
you see that can be more. I see it move. I see it 
square. I see it fade. I see it beautiful in figure. My 
vision is perfect in its sense. But it gives me nothing 
but light. And if I find out a universe of things by 
its colors, I do the same by the mere noises and smells 
that fall consentaneously with my vision. 

I see a distant city ; but the houses are out there, 
and the steeples are off far, only as the Alp horn is, 
because I have learned to translate. And all you tell 
me, that the eye actually places the city at the spot, I 
answer by remembering, so the ear does, so the nose 
does, in a much more imperfect way. The Alp horn 
sounds precisely where it is ; and I can hardly persuade 
my ear that she has learned to do herself injustice by 
her use ; that my hearing is not off yonder among the 
snows, but close at home ; and that the eye and the 
ear have nothing more than one way and one place 
for their sensations. 
8* 



1/8 Ontology. [Book III. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

TOUCH. 

TOUCH does us so much good in many metaphysi- 
cal ways that we might fear that a perception so versa- 
tile imits effects might fail to be traced to the same 
simplicity of sensation. But Touch, more than any 
other sense, is almost brutish in its plainness. What a 
child feels when it touches a cherry, it feels generically 
in everything. 

Now I do not deny that Touch has immense advan- 
tages : — ; 

i. It fits in so nobly with vision. I stand by a 
shelf, and look at a silver goblet. The sensation of 
sight is a mere consciousness of light in the goblet's 
shape on the hemisphere of vision. I touch the cup, 
and a harmony of fact is at once perceptible. I rap 
the cup and there is an agreement of sound. Taste 
and the other faculty of smell might be each arranged 
to bear a perceptible relation. But of all these har- 
monious facts the first is the most immediate. The 
eye and the finger meet at the same surface, and with- 
out staying to ask what language we shall use to 
describe this early agreement, the fact is conscious. 
The light upon my eye and the touch upon my nerve 
are a visible result, and that result may be as untu- 
tored as you please, it is obvious in both, that they 
stand related in some way harmoniously together. 

2. So Touch has an immense advantage in respect 
to surface. The eye has but a narrow inlet. So has 
Taste. The nose and the ear and the palate and the 
optic nerve, all have a limited dwelling place. Touch 
revels over all the body. 



Chap. XIX.] Sensation and the Idea of Not-Self. 179 

3. Moreover, it has wonderful variety. It feels 
warm, and it feels hard, and it feels smooth, and it feels 
pain, and) what is more, a muscular stress that it will 
require care to represent as only feeling : 

4. Because, next, Touch is connected with the 
empire of the will. I choose to smell, but the power 
with which I draw in the scent is a power of muscle, 
and reports itself to Touch before it reaches the pleas- 
ure of the odor. My Taste must be muscularly through 
touch. My sight, and above all my hearing, must be 
involuntary things, unless a motion, which is in the 
theatre of Touch, opens the eye, or moves the ear, into 
their theatre of pleasure. Touch, therefore, is an im- 
perial sense, less magnificent than sight, but more 
singularly rich in its reports of Being. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

SENSATION AS IT CONTRIBUTES TO THE IDEA OF NOT-SELF. 

THOUGH the Eye and the Ear and the other instru- 
ments of sense report consciously nothing but sensa- 
tions, yet those sensations appear consciously in shapes, 
and those shapes marvellously agree together. 

That silver urn comes upon my eye as a mere patch, 
the absolute sense being one of a mere surface. I have 
an eye-full of variegated lights, and this silver urn is 
simply one of them. 

But then I have seen this urn before. The mind, 
in its recurrent power, is not like sense, but may deal 
in many surfaces. I have my vision all on one : and 
though sense is far brighter than my memory, yet it 
has to confine itself to its absolute plane. I see the urn, 
but, as an absolute sensation, only a color. But the 
mind, by its recurrent lav/, builds an urn upon that 



180 Ontology. [Book III. 

face. It saw the back of it last week, and the inside 
yesterday. Or, if it never saw that urn, it has seen a 
thousand. Or, if it never saw an urn, it has seen things 
just like it. It puts its recurrences together. Now, 
you would rather help me if you would deny one 
resource or two, for they crowd upon me till I cannot 
build conveniently. They crowd upon me in amazing 
order; and the back and the side and the bottom of an 
urn all come in in place. What, as an actual sensation, 
is but a patch of light, adds to itself recurrent parts 
of it. 

Then my finger comes in. I touch the urn. Grant 
me my mere conscious sense. I smell it. I take my 
finger and wake it into sound. I take my tongue and 
it has a taste. Now limit these consciousnesses as 
much as you desire, there is an amazing harmony of 
sense, which does actually build itself fair and round. 

Say, all this would not produce the urn. I grant 
it ; and have a tale of much more. But it would pro- 
duce something ; and you may take the laboring pen 
and tell what that something is. We are conscious 
of nothing but sensations ; and those sensations are 
nothing but colored lights, smells, tastes, sounds, and 
feelings. But those thoughts, though bald in sense, 
are very rich in recurrent combination. And all 
recurrent senses, consciously perceived, do give enough 
for an urn ; for there is no discovered part of it that 
was not sometime visible. 

Now this urn, thus made of images ; thus built of 
harmonious sense, and lost sometimes to immediate 
consciousness, — comes finally to be identified at once. 
A spout will show it, or its topmost acorn. It breeds 
recurrence at a glance ; and the mind delights in it as 
a whole by the law of the strongest emotion. 



Chap. XXL] Body. l8l 

Now, if any man demands, Do you think this the 
whole of Not-self ? I answer, No. I am yet to speak 
of Body, and I am yet to speak of Will. But I say, 
This is a conscious something. I go up to the urn 
and put both hands upon it. It is cold and hard. I 
tap it on the top. I smell it, and taste its surface. I 
gaze at it, and it is covered by my hands. I step back 
from it. It is an image in its place. I say, All these 
things are conscious : and if you will do me the favor 
to take out from them everything but sense (save only 
what may be recurrent), something will remain : now it 
is that something that I pronounce to be some thought 
of Not-Self. 

CHAPTER XX. 

SENSATION AS IT CONTRIBUTES TO THE IDEA OF SELF. 

If perception could not begin without Sensation, 
Self of course could not emerge ; because, as we have 
seen, the mind could not become conscious without 
perception. 

If perception could not begin without Sensation, 
Sensation must have an important role all the way 
through. Self, therefore, being revealed to us by a 
continuous orderly current, what Sense contributes to 
the current it contributes to our idea of Self. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

BODY. 

In the region of the Not-self lies a something 
which, curiously enough, is all mixed up with the 
absolute Ego. The Eye and the Ear and the Nose 
and the Tongue and the whole net-work of nervous 
tentacula are parts of what we call the Body. Bodies 



1 82 Ontology. [Book III. 

are unveiled through instruments that are parts of 
themselves. 

Two things may be said of Body : — 

1. First, that it is, like the urn, cognized by the 
nerve sense and completely in the same methods. I 
look upon the urn, and precisely with the same per- 
ceiving I look upon my body. It seems to me round 
and full, and I build it up with recurrent sights of it, 
just as I do the other. I strike the urn, and so I 
strike my body. Sound and smell and taste and tact- 
ual sensation can all be experienced upon this hulk of 
flesh, precisely as they can be experienced upon a lump 
of gold or upon the silver goblet. Let it be under- 
stood, therefore, that, if the body differs from the silver 
urn, it differs in the direction of plus, and that, quite 
consciously as respects sensation. 

It belongs to the external world as distinctly as 
my raiment. But then it has another whole mass of 
facts, which have only to be added to those that belong 
to everything. 

2. It is found that this something behaves double 
in respect to all my sense. The eye that, looks out 
upon my leg finds itself carried about with it — nay, 
looks out on it from a position in the body. The nose 
not only smells my hand, and drinks the perfume on it 
as on a rose or on a bean, but is found in partnership 
with my hand, the smell itself finding its centre in my 
nostril. My tongue tastes my finger, and my finger 
feels my tongue, and both that instant in the current. 
The current seizes them in one. And the whole wil- 
derness of Touch has this double action. I touch the 
urn, and it is simple. I touch my hand, and it is a 
double effect. It is the wakening of two sensations ; 
and the sound and the smell and the taste and the 



Chap. XXIII.] Body and the Not-Self. 183 

light and these two sensations and the whole crowd 
that can be packed into my present consciousness, 
are found to be blended into this: — that they are in 
one perception of the current, and in one accord in 
this thing called Body. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

BODY AS IT ADDS TO THE IDEA OF SELF. 

Now it can be imagined that in the infancy of 
thought Body could be supposed to constitute the 
Ego. And it does not involve the peril of that genesis 
of Self that I before considered. 

Order in a continual current, with the power to 
have that order back in the way of recurrent threads 
of it, a path re-beating itself again, until a foot of it 
flashes back in glances of a mile, this is that loitering 
consciousness that we learn to speak of under the name 
of Self. But yet no mortal can fail to see, that that 
oneness of body which we feel to our very sole, helps 
the report of consciousness ; and that a something (1) 
shaped to us like the urn, and then (2) knit to us by 
every sense, must be consciously united, first (1) as the 
urn is by single-handed sense, and second (2) in a 
double way, by what is equally our mere sensation. 

This unity, therefore, helps our idea of Ego. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

BODY AS IT ADDS TO THE IDEA OF NOT-SELF. 

BUT in a still more striking way the sensations of 
Body unveil the external world. 

1. They help the idea of outness, which has been so 
much talked of by philosophers. 



1 84 Ontology. [Book III. 

Now, I do not mean the rude reality, that the body 
unveils the universe because it carries the senses. 
That of course. Nor do I mean, what is a more perti- 
nent claim, that it carries us to the scene of our sensa- 
tions. I do not mean that it opens the eye, and draws 
in the odor, and moves the tongue. I do not even 
delay to show its dexterity of feeling. All these 
things will be known of and thought of of course. I 
mean, that the mere sense that unveils a body, the 
mere sight that ranges from the eye, and the smell and 
the taste and the wide-spread tactual impressions, all 
of which have conscious sensations of position, sketch 
that body forth into a figured shape, like the urn or 
goblet ; do it by usual sense like the urn or goblet ; 
but do it over again by sense utterly unusual and dif- 
ferent ; that is, frame my body precisely as I would 
the urn, by sight and touch, but do it also, as I can 
frame no other thing, by double consciousnesses, not 
only the set by which I know the urn, but a set, just as 
consciously perceived, by which the smell feels itself at 
the nerve, and light at the optic threads, and the taste 
and the sound and the touch at each conscious point 
of the sensation, by which the whole feels itself in the 
current, and by which this whole shapes itself upon 
our material frame just as consciously and just as 
mechanically as the urn by my sensations. And I 
mean that when the body is thus set forth by nerve 
perceptions, the outness from it of other things is a 
mere sensation. 

Why should a man admit angles and admit shapes 
as open to our consciousness ? Why should he con- 
fess they are consciously before my eyes — an absolute 
sensation ; and not admit that externality is just the 
same ? Here is the leap, that has puzzled men so much, 



Chap. XXIII.] Body and the Not-Self. 185 

from the inward to the outward. But is not outward- 
ness just as much a feature of our sense, as blueness, 
or pitch in sound ? 

The urn I noticed is either outside or inside my 
body. If it is outside, is that not consciously my sen- 
sation ? And is not the interval between, like inter- 
vals of any sort, a strong reality of vision. 

2. Again, the idea of body by its unity leads me to 
a more intelligible world outside. 

The idea of unity is triumphant in the body. The 
harmonious nerves lap all round it, and bring intelli- 
gence of sense from every corner. Each square inch 
of sense reports ; and, what is more, reports from every 
inch may come almost each instant. The body is uni- 
fied in almost every consciousness. 

Now, as the body besides all this is visible, also, like 
the urn, it is easy to see how the unity conscious in the 
body suggests unity in other objects. Color and 
sound and smell and taste and all tactual impression 
are themselves adequate quoad the urn to ideas quoad 
hoc ; but recollect, we claim every atom of conscious 
perception. And accumulating everything as we go 
along, we say, that what simple sense begins, the body, 
as sensible, adds to and knits together. And carrying 
about this sensitive and harmoniously reported hulk, I 
claim all that it perceives. It is a great mass with 
harmoniously reported sensations ; and I say that, con- 
sciously thus unified, it helps to the idea in objects 
that are spectacled around it. 

3. Again, it has inward feelings. It feels all through 
as well as all over. 

It is perhaps imprudent in me to attempt categories 
of comparison. I am much more zealous to hold clear 
one fact, that Being is piled up by our perceptions ; 



1 86 Ontology. [Book III. 

that it grows in all we wot of it by downright con- 
sciousness ; that it is immensely heaped together by one 
perception and another ; and that what our perceptions 
do not make of it out of all that is consciously combined, 
is not Being, that is, is not Self or Not-self, in any way 
that we can dream of or believe. 

Sense actually carrying to us inward feelings, we 
just add those as we do the rest. The heart and the 
lungs and all the interior viscera report themselves. 
I feel all through what I call my person physically. 
Now, what I want confessed is, that these things, 
which are consciously perceived, give notions accord- 
ingly of other being. The urn and the body are both 
similarly perceived. The body is perceived also addi- 
tionally, and in a way dissimilarly to the urn. This 
way gets noticed, and gives me feelings of substance 
which I attribute to the urn. And in the old Hindoo 
theology, and in the every-day experience of children, 
inside facts are attributed without, which are actually 
over-reasonings. The urn is supposed to feel. The 
clod is invested with too much of our inward life. The 
little hideous gods are preached of as only samples of 
this inward and universally existing sense. I mean, all 
matter is supposed to feel ; and beyond all shadow of 
a doubt, our thoughts of matter are but slenderly right, 
even though we may have taken out of them a great 
deal of pantheistic prepossession. 

Now, to repeat my idea, matter is just what we 
have sense to make it, I do not mean that it is not 
more ; on the contrary we have actual sense for mak- 
ing it what we consciously perceive, — and that very 
thing — more : but beyond what we consciously per- 
ceive, including this very idea of more, matter as a 
noumenon is nothing but the sum of my perceivings ; 



Chap. XXIV.] Will, Power, and Cause. 187 

and body in all its traits, and sense in all its out- 
givings, all the myriad differences of vision, and, the rest, 
and all their harmonized recurrences, make up my ideas 
beyond me — beyondness itself being a mere reality 
of my working consciousness. 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

WILL, POWER, AND CAUSE. 

We have already exhibited Perception as resulting 
(in two conditions of its consciousness) in certain very 
imperial effects. 

1. When it desires the stay of a thought ; that is, 
when it is so strong in its emotion that the thought 
coming in by that law continues to be pleasant, and, as 
the effect of a whole experience, desires and expects 
and sees fit, as men philosophically express it, to con- 
tinue in the mind, we call that the phenomenon of at- 
tention, and we have already established the fact that 
Will has but one other province that can possibly be 
divined. 

2. That other province is muscular motion. Now 
this obedience of the muscle gives, in its shadowiest 
outline, the idea of Power. My thoughts go sailing 
along, and one of them with its peculiar emotion moves 
a muscle. It is in fact a thought to move that muscle, 
or, to speak less learnedly, a thought to do a thing 
which the infant as he kicked and fumbled learned 
would be done at certain thoughts of ( it by the 
mind. Able to say, therefore, what shall be done, the 
infant moves one step further in sense, and experiences 
Power, but Power only in its earlier gleam of desire as 
it determines motion. 

Separate altogether from this is a nisus which is 



1 88 Ontology. [Book III. 

conscious in our sense. And hastening at once to 
terms, I say, this nisus is a physical pressure. Let me 
be understood. I do not disown the sense that it is a 
nisus ; but the nisus is not the sense. I teach barely 
two consciousnesses, one a desire, the other a pressure. 
The desire may be dismissed at once as already 
treated. The pressure is all that is left in this con- 
scious sensation. 

Now let us understand it. A timber lying on my 
leg exerts, as we are conscious, only a tactual impres- 
sion. We call it pressure : but confine yourself to the 
simple thought. A finger touched upon your nose, 
or a feather wafted to your cheek, are not generically 
different from the timber in their touch sensations. 
Now articulately then you will understand the speech 
when I say, that the pressures bidden by the will are 
precisely of a piece with the squeeze that is felt from 
the timber. 

Anatomically, I know there is a difference. But 
metaphysically, there are but two facts, a desire and 
decree and choice long ago put together in these chap- 
ters, and, secondly, a mere sensation. 

If any one asks, Is there not a strain of some kind? 
I say, Yes, upon the muscle. If any one asks, Are we 
not conscious of it in our mind ? I say, Yes, as a sen- 
sation. If any one asks, But is it not a sensation of 
a strain? I say, Yes; but, metaphysically considered, 
the strain is not generically different from a pressure. 

Let me explain this now critically. 

I have what we have combined into the complexity 
of Will. I have what follows as the swelling of my 
muscle. The first I am conscious of as Will. The 
second I am conscious of as a sensation. I do not 
doubt that interposed between the two there are 



Chap. XXIV.J Will, Power, and Cause. 1 89 

physiological facts of nerve and cerebellum. That is not 
the question. We are talking of what we are con- 
scious. Our study of the facts is entirely in the cur- 
rent. Now I say, after we have desired with the Will 
we only feel the pressure consequent. 

If I could will to weigh down the timber, and, with- 
out a hand upon it, I could make it press at the direc- 
tion of my desire (as perhaps angels do), I would imi- 
tate, generically considered, the feeling about the mus- 
cle. That is to say, There are present two conscious- 
nesses, the consciousness of an imperial Will, and the 
consciousness of a sensational pressure, with no con- 
sciousness between, and no knowledge, reported to 
the sense, of nervous messages that may fly between 
them. 

Now I clear off a great deal of doubt by one perti- 
nent reminder, — that what may be generically the 
same, specifically may be very different. The pressure 
of the timber is one specific thing; the pressure under 
the muscle is multiform and diverse in its sense. For 
example ; this cannon-ball ! Here I am raising it in 
my hand. What do I experience? First of all a swell- 
ing pressure at the muscles. I need not picture it ; 
for a man can strain his arm, and try it for himself; 
second, a leverage strain of a very peculiar sort, un- 
doubtedly a cultivated idea when we speak of the 
lever of the arm, but a mere conscious one in its 
peculiar pressure ; lastly, the mere timber over again, 
that is, weight and touch, or, in other words, the ball, 
as it is raised, touching and pressing in the fingers. 

Besides, there is more than this ; there is fatigue, 
like hunger, and a sense of effort uneasily submitted to 
as a form of bodily pain ; and I do not for a moment 
question that other attributes might be added to the 



190 Ontology. [Book III. 

list. Touch is a badly generalized sensation. But all 
the discoveries that might be made whatever, would 
bow to the consciousness, that, when I lift the shot, 
the strain is all sensation. Outside of the dictum of 
the Will there is nothing that can be traced but what 
generically is like tactual impressions. 

But though I have thus carefully enforced this 
generic sameness in the sense, I shall be able all the 
more usefully to employ the specific difference. 

There is a strain upon the muscle which, though sen- 
sationally pressure, consciously is peculiar to itself, and 
in connection with the Will initiates our idea of Power. 

As before, I only ask consciousnesses. They are rich 
beyond even our need. 

I am conscious of the imperial desire. I am con- 
scious of the immediate strain. I am conscious of 
ulterior results. The total ; what is it ? In your own 
language, it shall be, usque hoc, empirically my idea of 
Power. And if any one says, Consciously not so ; for 
the nexus is the thing we want ; and you have devel- 
oped only an order not continuous in the current, — I 
say, One thing in the order is an idea of Power. It is 
not mere antecedence and consequence. The mus- 
cle's strain is a reality in sense. The will before it is 
an ancillary consciousness. The cannon ball that 
moves is the absolute result. And I say, these things 
together, peculiarly the first, give us in shadowy form 
an idea of Power. 

I need hardly make a separate treatise on Cause. 
Philology employs the terms. Their difference is 
philologically great. Their employment is mechani- 
cally necessary. Nay, their theatre is but partially the 
same. But metaphysically we have explained them 
both. 



Chap. XXIV.] Will, Power, and Cause, 191 

That every effect must have a cause means simply 
that this ball-raising is a universal experience. If any 
one says, Nay ; that is an intuitive belief, — we put off 
that question to a subsequent chapter. But if he says, 
as a ground for there being an intuitive belief, that 
there is no causal nexus, meaning by that that there 
is no idea of cause possible in the mind, that brings us 
exactly to what we have been saying of Power. The 
causal nisus and the muscular nisus take their very 
expressions from each other. 

The cause in the wax, that melts it under the shin- 
ing of the sun, may be mysterious and practically invis- 
ible. But men learn like children. The little infant 
gets an idea of strain ; wrinkles its little face under the 
effort to rise up from his crib. Ten million of repeated 
thrusts must give him some idea of strength. And it 
is this stress continually on our sense that would be 
hard to dispossess of some gleam of this wonderfully 
agitated matter of causation. 

At any rate, we will show the folly, in a subsequent 
chapter, of an intuitive belief where we have no possible 
idea, and be all the more careful now to show that we 
have an idea. 

The wax melts not at all for like causes with the lift- 
ing of the ball ; but let it be remembered we were 
dealing with the springs of thought. The child is to 
live a score of years. The first weights that he may 
lift give him a shadowy sense ; but he is to lift a mil- 
lion. He is to see a million lifted by other men. He 
is to run against brute pressure, and to have piled upon 
him material weight. And in the midst of it all, he is 
to have his own imperial will, and his own muscular 
strains, to pattern forever what is to be meant by these 
causations. 



I9 2 Ontology. [Book III. 

Now I know that the wax does not melt that way. 
But how does it melt ? It melts, you say, by some 
causal nisus. Very well, he has generalized all that. 
He has observed ten thousand powers travelling out 
from his first lessons in the cradle. The grand central 
ones were more mechanic. But the list has been en- 
larged. He adds now everything to it. He found 
motions and liftings had to be produced, and he looks 
further ; till the circle of what he calls Power has been 
increased to the very extreme ; till changes unrelated 
to the first are found just as certainly to show causation. 

Science comes in to tell us what makes the analogy 
more complete, but we did not know that all the time. 
In our intermediate state we called that thing Power 
which had the very slenderest similitude to that which 
we felt upon the muscle. 

I am to be held to the strongest accountability at last 
(Chap. XXXVIII.) to tell whether all these things are 
ONLY perceptions ; but before that reckoning day comes, 
I wish to teach boldly, that they are all perceived ; and 
that though, with all the rest, they are what we per- 
ceive and more, still the MORE that they are is itself 
also a dictate of Sensation. 

It is a bold ephemera of thought to teach, as this 
century does, that there are beliefs where there is no 
perception. 

CHAPTER XXV. 

WILL, POWER, AND CAUSE, AS THEY ADD TO THE IDEA OF THE NOT- 
SELF. 

CALLING back, now, the idea of two orders, the 
order of interior thought, and the order of external har- 
mony, it has been seen how each particular sensation, 
though originally one, appears on both these harmo- 



Chap. XXV.] Will and the Idea of Not -Self. 193 

nized groupings. The blue color appears on that har- 
monized, assemblage that we call the sky, and in that 
interminable current that we call our consciousness. 

Now, we might anticipate the like in anything so 
conscious as the strain of muscle. 

And blueness being a simple consciousness, and 
Power being conscious, as we have seen, we can 
understand it all the better. The Will being a con- 
scious thought, and the nisus being a physical sensa- 
tion, and the idea of Power partaking of these two, we 
can understand how it should attribute itself within to 
our inward consciousness, and how it should attribute 
itself without as belonging to our body. 

The more might this become the case because body 
for a long time would be mixing up with self. The 
infant would hardly get them separate. The man of 
adult years would incorporate self undoubtedly, and 
give to it ideas of body. And while this was so, Power 
would be shared between them. And if science car- 
ried such a sway as to convince the man that body 
was altogether outside his consciousness, it would still 
preserve of course its ideas of Power, the muscular 
stress being a better thing to translate into our ideas 
of body, than blueness or smell or any other of our 
usual sensations. 

Parting with self, however, the body would cast off 
the Will. As we became cleared in our intelligence 
the nisus would stand out more separately. We would 
retain the shadow that Will had helped to give, but 
mould it with a continual difference ; till the various 
stragglings of the flesh, incessantly perceived, would 
make Power more visible, till we came steadily to attach 
it as an attribute of these muscles of our system. 

But, obviously, there would be shadows of it with- 



194 Ontology. [Book III. 

out. The ball, when lifted in the hand, would have its 
nisus. Its pressure downward would be felt like the 
pressure upward of the muscle. This would be wit- 
nessed every day. The tree bent over by our nisus 
would bend back with all its force by a nisus of its 
own. Though Will would vulgarly perplex this thought 
of Power, yet ultimately we would get rid of it, and 
have left pure force suggested originally with the Will, 
but divested at last of all idea of it. 

Still, Power would be but a shadowy idea. And 
what I mean now is this. Consciously there can be 
nothing but perception. Perception as alleged of 
Power began by being Will and nerve feeling. And 
the shadow that arose from thence was a conviction 
that there must be MORE. The consciousness of the 
Will, and the conscious immediate strain, and the con- 
scious visible results, and then the conscious pressure 
of the ball, and further still the strain that is from the 
tree, — all are perfectly conscious perceptions ; but then 
they are consciously different, and that leaves a shadow 
over the whole. There seems to be a strain without 
Will, and a nisus absolutely independent of the Body. 
And that leaves an idea of Pozver ; something more 
than a mere associate of Self, and something else than 
consequent upon any usual volition. 

What is that, therefore ? 

Plainly, a shadow. Plainly a thing hinted at rather 
than discovered. Plainly an empirical belief; and, to 
place it just in the position where in a future chapter 
we will make it generically stand, it is a thing discovered 
by consciousness itself, but discovered to be uncertain ; 
that is, discovered to be probable by something that 
we are conscious of as its like ; discovered to be 
a-wanted in a chain where in another chain a link just 



Chap, xxvi.] Will and the Idea of Self. 195 

like it is consciously supplied ; discovered perceptibly 
by its effects ; but then not on the principle that of 
necessity there must be a cause ; but on the conscious 
fact that in a million instances the effect has had one. 

Now, therefore, to the main subject that is in place 
we are prepared to speak in saying, — that Power, being 
thus evolved, goes out from the conscious Self, and 
attaches itself to trees and balls. Of course it adds to 
the idea of Not-self. The Unity that was borrowed 
in a previous chapter from the Body, is made more 
complete in the rock or in the urn by this harmony of 
Power. Indeed, it takes new aspects. Externality, 
figured forth, gets more vital, as though conscious of 
itself. Indeed too much so; for it was not always in 
the history of men that the ball weighing down was 
not imagined to have will, and the tree snapping back. 
The standing out independence of things, quoad our 
consciousness, seeming only to be images, is immeasur- 
ably helped by these multiplied introactions of what is 
outward and our muscular volitions. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

WILL, POWER, AND CAUSE, AS THEY ADD TO THE IDEA OF SELF. 

But matter, with its new gifts, returns to help its 
comrade. Matter without Power, seeming only like 
an image, when endowed with force seems to get 
still further off from us. And this force is endlessly 
different. We have seen in a previous chapter how it 
gets generalized into everything that will make results. 
The muscular nisus of the arm gets generalized with 
the action of a mirror. The likeness is of the most 
shadowy sort. No marvel! Blueness and smell have 
no likeness ; and so, shape and melody. Will is a 



196 Ontology. [Book III. 

conscious thing: motion is a conscious thing : strain 
is a conscious thing: weight is a conscious thing. 
These leave their prints, and are reported back into 
our consciousness. Then, as we travel out, things of 
diminished likeness — the pressure of the wind ; the 
waving of the forest ; the pelting of a storm of hail ; 
these all throng innumerably. Of course conscious- 
nesses are had of them ; and these consciousnesses 
contain two things, first, direct consciousness of 
facts, and, second, direct consciousnesses of evident 
resemblance. The mind by its amazing harmonies 
groups all these ; and, as its result, Power falls heir to 
a huge class that bears but a small analogy to original 
musculation. 

Now, armed with this thought, the Not-Self helps 
the Self; that is to say, the mind, having learned to 
count its own images without as independent powers, 
returns with them to edify itself. 

A class of these powers it finds wakening sensation. 
That is, all sense moves, so the mind discovers, at the 
beck of Not-Self. Hearing dies if there is nothing to 
provoke it. I scrape a light, and then I see. I ting 
a lyre, and then I hear ; uncork a vase, and then I 
smell ; touch my forehead, or I cannot feel. Self, 
therefore, gets this incident from Not-Self, that it is a 
consciousness that can be acted on. In other words, 
the Not-Self, being only an order, or, to talk more 
vulgarly, being at first only an image, gets an indepen- 
dent stand from certain attributes of Power ; and so 
the Self, being at first only a current, gets a shadow 
of consistence from finding that it can be acted on. 
Not-Self gives sensation and something more ; and so 
Self feels sensation and something more ; that is, as 
we shall now increasingly explain, Being, though 



Chap. XXVII.] Self and Not-Self Build each Other. 197 

revealed by consciousness, is revealed as possessing 
more than consciousness, and that by conscious analo- 
gies traced in the resemblances of consciousness itself. 
Meanwhile, to sum our chapter : — Will, Power, and 
Cause add to the Idea of Self in this, that beyond its 
being a mere order of consciousnesses, it is found to be 
at least such an order as this, that it can be acted upon, 
and caused by moods that it does not will, in the con- 
dition of the other order not continuous. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE IDEAS OF SELF AND NOT-SELF AS THEY ADD TO EACH OTHER. 

An idea very valuable in all my ideas of Being, is 
the idea of Continuity. 

Where do I get it ? 

I look at a rock, and it prints itself upon my con- 
sciousness. I look at it again, and it comes recur- 
rently ; that is, my sensation that is fresh, has fitting 
itself upon it a sensation that recurs. Now I conclude 
that that rock has stood there ; and why ? 

Observe, I have no evidence of it in my sight. I 
have but immediate consciousness. W^hen odors fade 
from my nerve, what tell they of anything continuous ? 
Besides, I may be the victim of a mistake. The rock 
may have been crumbled up, and carved in like fash- 
ion again. The principle of the " same sum of Being," * 
is mere shop-work to account for difficulties. The 
idea that a grand mountain remains, is not a native 
one, and must be learned by experience. Now, as I 
cannot watch all mountains, why, when one heaves in 
sight, — why am I so pat in the conviction that it has 
been there all the time? 

* Hamilton. 



198 Ontology. [Book III. 

Obviously, here ; — Self lends to Not-Self. 

The order in the current is continuous. There is 
an order not continuous, as, for example, where the 
mountain comes and goes again in its harmonies before 
the mind. But there is an order that is continuous, 
because, though consciousness is an immediate thing, 
it recurs ; and by its recurrences weaves back a chain 
of Self in the way that we have considered. Now this 
chain of Self associates itself with the Body, and knits 
all that into its chain of continuousness. Not that I 
am willing to teach that the Body is never forgotten 
(for even the mind may be, in sleep) ; but that it is so 
associated with sense as not possibly to be severed 
from it in the idea of our own continuousness. 

The body though, like the secular men among the 
monks, goes out to mingle with the world. My hand 
is just as earthy as the rock. If my hand continues, 
so, by analogy, all. And my frame, therefore, becomes 
a scaffolding of thought by which I climb to the per- 
manency of all that is external. 

Permanence, therefore, 1 is one of the great facts 
that the Self offers to the Not-Self. 

But now a serious consequence ! If the mountain 
must be permanent, it is permanent without conscious- 
ness. 

The continuous idea of my Self is made easy because 
my consciousness continues ; and this truly is the great 
attribute of Ego, that it never parts with consciousness. 
But here certainly is a great stride without, that what 
began as a consciousness, comes now to be something 
utterly without it. The clamor of a horn was mere 
sense. The glimmer of the urn was a mere patch upon 
my vision. The carrion pelt was a mere fume upon my 
nostril. But it has come to this, that these conscious- 



Chap. XXVII.] Self and Not-Self Build each Other. 1 99 

nesses have so well agreed into themselves as to stand 
out in conscious images. Though the present puts in 
the front, and the past comes in with its recurrences, 
yet the urn stands urn-like in my consciousness, and 
my nose and my ringer wander to it and have also their 
harmonies. And yet this harmonized consciousness 
(adding also power and other bodily ideas), gleams 
at last into something unconscious; that is, a continu- 
ance of the image after its hardness or its blueness have 
absolutely faded from the mind. 

Now, call not this belief simply. There is some 
idea. This thing has traced itself, and earned its 
Being. Flesh, having reported itself as continually 
conscious, there is a manifest likeness between the 
flesh and the rock. My first impulse is to call the rock 
conscious. But driven from that, what follows ? Why 
that something must remain ; and like the body it must 
be something of Power, and, like the body, permanent 
in shape and figure. 

We see, therefore, at a glance, what an immensity 
is done by Self for the entity of the Not-Self. % 

But, now, obversely : — Of course the outward, being 
seen as cognizable in permanent being, reflects that 
thought upon the inward. If rock may be something 
fixed, so, travelling back, must be the body, and so, 
travelling back, may be a mind. If rock lasts when it 
is unseen, so something may when we are in slumber. 
If Ego seems a mere conscious journey, the facts that it 
finds out, viz : its action upon body, and the action of 
body upon consciousness, must all be showing their 
analogies. If body lasts, so may mind. If body may 
exist unconscious, so may mind. If body be possessed 
of power, may not mind be? Order continuous in the 
current, and order not continuous, started as mere 



200 Ontology. [Book III. 

perceptions. They were conscious as harmonious 
groups. They partook of sensations with each other. 
They gathered each to each immense accumulations. 
Now, if one by that singular sensation of power, and 
by its likeness to the body, retrocedes out of a passing 
consciousness, and claims an abiding entity, why may 
not the other, acted upon by this and claiming com- 
mon facts, arrive at the same idea of corresponding 
Being ? 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

THE IDEA OF OTHER SELVES AS IT ADDS TO THE IDEA OF SELF 
AND NOT-SELF. 

It might be an easier plan to show how the being 
of self could be supposed, to remember that, in the 
cruder form, Self is included in the Body. 

The wandering Goth had perhaps no other idea. 
Now, as a continuous something attaches most easily 
to the Body, especially when it has suggested (and then 
returned from doing so) the unconscious continuances 
without, it would be perhaps far the simplest to say, 
that the body, having the idea of continuousness, 
and being supposed to include the mind, gives that 
the idea of Being, and Self, once existent, never loses 
the idea. 

If Self be nothing but a round of exercises, cer- 
tainly it thinks otherwise, and thinks falsely to a large 
degree ; that is, our ideas of Self are largely corrupted 
by the body. 

Our existent entity, taken up primarily from the 
animal frame, takes up many of its coarsenesses with it ; 
and perhaps, therefore, the most philosophical account 
of all is, that self begins with a conscious order, advances 
into a physical awareness of itself still further in the 



Chap. XXVIII.] Other Selves Build Self and Not- Self. 20 1 

body; adds afterward the idea of power; and, being 
possessed of an easy sense of continuousness in its 
physical frame, retires out of that, only when the most 
reduplicated analogies lead it to more interior imagina- 
tion of Being. 

However it ends, therefore, certainly the perma- 
nence of matter makes our largest eclaircissement of an 
unconscious entity for mind. 

This being so, how wonderfully must it contribute 
to the result, to see other bodies, and to argue from 
them other minds ; especially to see animal bodies, 
and to infer from them other resemblances. 

Unquestionably the idea of brutes helps our ideas 
even of our Maker. 

But, in respect to man, — the rock having borrowed 
continuousness from our ideas of body, hands it on 
again with large interest when we see other figures 
heave in sight — the very image of our material frame. 
Possessed of sensation all through Self, and all through 
body, which, in coarser minds, is part or the whole of 
Self, it is impossible to see a leg without thinking of its 
sense, or an arm without ideas of the nisus ; and thus 
other men's senses come of course to be considered ; 
with this important difference, that it is no longer con- 
scious sense that is perceived, but sense imagined to 
be conscious in a consciousness not conscious where it 
is conceived : I mean by that, consciousness conscious 
but in another man. I repeat : worlds of addition is 
made here to the idea of entity ; and I want it felt, as 
these consciousnesses are stated, that each adds its trait; 
that each piles the already accumulated assemblage ; 
and that, if the bitterest sceptic would only tell us what 
each of these incontestably experienced conscious- 
nesses adds to the assembled group, we would be pre- 
9* 



202 Ontology. [Book III. 

pared to use his terms for the genesis of the ontologi- 
cal idea. 

Not only men, but brutes ; not only brutes, but trees ; 
not only trees, but rocks, — these forms are all unques- 
tioned in our vision. Now rocks, seen in visible analo- 
gies with all the three, borrow their attributes, and in 
the end lend them back, and in the end multiply them 
by diverse relations and impressions, till Power and 
Will and Continuousness, and all the legomena of sense, 
speak together, and shed their reflected lights, and all 
upon the idea of Being. 

A body becomes not my body but one like it. 
Its senses become not my senses but similar and se- 
riously different : its consciousness, if we but look to 
the primary idea, no consciousness really at all. The 
otherness of all this is in fact a new and strong idea, 
and helps in unnumbered ways our important point, — 
that all that can be learned by consciousness, whether 
ontological or not, must be either intuitive or empiri- 
cal ; that is to say, must either be consciousness barely, 
or else, what is a wider field, what consciousness dis- 
covers to be its like. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

EFFECTS OF THEOLOGY ON THE IDEA OF BEING. 

I WILL not anticipate the origin of the idea of God, 
and, therefore, can dwell but meagrely upon the effect 
of Theism upon our Idea of Being. I want it however 
thus early to fix our point, that Being is a great accu- 
mulation. 

Being, among different people (and of course by that 
I mean, the idea among different people), is this or that 
largely according to their training. If Being is solely, 
according to the true account, what men can gather 



Chap. XXX.] Science and the Idea of Being. 203 

up into it empirically by reduplicated observations, it 
takes-on this or that additional construction, according 
to the facts that men have brought into their conscious- 
ness. To the Fakir it is all perceptive, even to the 
rock and to the clod. When he leaves his person, in- 
stead of travelling to plants and mountains as things 
that unconsciously exist, he just travels on as though 
the whole were conscious. He steps upon the earth 
as though it felt his trampling ; and, therefore, he 
gathers up a little portion of it into a god, to represent 
by that little fragment of it its whole intelligence. 
He makes no difference sensitively between the rock 
and his finger. 

Theology, therefore, must operate marvellously. 

Through all the journey that we have thus far 
been describing, if we travel at last to a Deity, it is 
easy to see how entities would recede under the truth. 
We would grow modest in the end about imagining 
ANYTHING BUT POWER. And though the difficulties 
of that would continue back into the Deity, still it 
would give all a shadov/y phase. We would trace the 
mystery of matter to the invisible God ; and knowing 
that He is unseen, we. would yield better to the invisi- 
blenesses of matter, and to the shadowy Power to 
which we seem endlessly at last to trace it. 

CHAPTER XXX. 

EFFECTS OF SCIENCE ON THE IDEA OF BEING. 

The Self and the Not-Self tracing themselves back 
further when we get the idea of God, so they do when 
we get the ideas of Science. 

To the Hindoo, even when not Buddhist, body may 
well seem himself. And as he travels out to what is 



204 Ontology. [Book III. 

external, it may be hard to divorce matter from sense 
or consciousness. The best of us in our lazy moods, 
and perhaps the best of us forever, make body include 
our-Self, and make matter automatic like the body. 
Science however, at least, influences this. The educa- 
ted man gets matter more entirely dead, and gets mind 
far backward out of the body. And yet Science holds 
up the fact of the meagreness of sense. It tells us that 
there are but five gates to do all our journeying to the 
outward. It tells us that there is but one way to com- 
municate with every sense. It tells us that every one 
requires a propulsion on its organ. It tells us that the 
residuum in every search is finally the idea of Power. 
It tells us that light must impinge upon a web, and 
sound upon a drum, and smell upon a couple of nerve- 
plaits, and so of course touch and flavor, and then, there- 
fore, that varieties of Power are all that can be traced 
in exterior Being. Like things are pronounced upon the 
Ego ; and though all these facts do not take us out of 
the court of consciousness, yet they affect our whole 
thought, and make an addition to our views of Being. 
These we must again repeat and, therefore, take 
from all things ; and it is the amazing harmony of 
sense (that is, the order not continuous) that makes it 
pile up so, and so endlessly subtract as well as add, 
while the idea of Being is being put together. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

THE WORD BEING. 

CONSCIOUSNESS, being so very express, and report- 
ing so very consciously, would bring its reports most ne- 
cessarily through the verb ' to be* Most naturally would 
this be so if the verb l to see' should begin to fail it. 



Chap. XXXIII.] The Word Substance. 205 

If I looked upon the urn, and found it most stub- 
bornly in ■ place, and felt it and smelt it and found it 
harmonious in my vision, I would part with the idea, 
1 1 see,' and deal in the fact, ' it is.' 

In other words, walking and sleeping and coming 
back, there would be the urn again, — grant, now, merely 
an image. And while consciousness would put in its 
face in immediate sensation, recurrence would put in 
its back, and touch and sound would complete a har- 
monious impression. This impression consciously as I 
look, I can realize this instant. It is, whatever I reason 
about it ; and call it image if you will, I cannot strip 
it of absolute BEING. 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE WORD EXISTENCE.. 

BUT not only does it BE in spite of what we think 
of it, but it EX-ISTS; it STANDS OUT. This stereo- 
scopic rilievo, — though it is empirical, yet it is made up 
of the clearest dictates of consciousness. Grant that 
it is a mere image (with Berkeley), still its thereness 
learned from the body, and its outness seen from the 
body, and its distance measured by touch, are all 
apparent. It EX-ISTS. If it be the ghost of a fancy, 
still these particulars can be known. And, therefore, 
aside from Perception, there is a name for this abiding 
harmony. 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 

THE WORD SUBSTANCE. 

Again, it sub-stats. 

And I had always thought that this was a difficult 
word for a mere empirical observer. I had always 



206 Ontology. [Book III. 

thought it meant, It stands under, and might allude to 
to a tertium quid bearing up qualities — too early a 
conception, it struck me, of Qualities as opposed to 
Substance. 

But, in looking at some old dictionaries, I found 
that substare meant to resist, and substantia, some- 
thing that resists ; and I saw immediately its primor- 
dial explanation. 

The urn, visible before my consciousness, has this 
fact about it, that, if I touch, it, it resists. The image 
is all apparent without that trial of touch ; but this 
consciousness which BE's, and also EX-ISTS, has this 
separate phenomenon, that in its outness, and its there- 
ness, i. e. just at the margin of color, it SUB-STATS, 
i. e. it RESISTS the finger that is pushed out toward 
its surface. 

Like a guide-post, therefore, the word points, not 
to Intuitive Beliefs, but, like outness and thereness, to 
conscious experience ; a downright resistance of touch 
which finds itself encountered in harmony with vision. 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

SELF AND NOT-SELF HIGHLY COMPLEX IDEAS. 

Being is either Self or Not-Self. 

I. Not-Self is either that which is entirely material, 
or else it is other selves. 

That which is entirely material is either perception, 
or else it is not a matter of consciousness (B. I. Chap. 
IV.). Now sensation is a perception. Let us begin 
our inquiry as to the true idea of being by asking (i.) 
whether the not-self, considered as matter, is all or any 
part of it sensation. 

This, at first view, will be scouted at as utter trifling. 



Chap. XXXIV.] Self and Not-Self Complex Ideas. 207 

Sensation is a print upon the nerves. It is true it has 
two meanings, one the potential faculty, the other the 
print as it is perceived. But this last sense, which is the 
one which is questioned, is so fleetingly a mental act, 
that to ask whether sensation is matter, seems to be 
trifling with the whole metaphysical theme. And yet 
query now, What are we asking for? Are we asking 
for the meaning of a word ? or. are we asking for an un- 
written thought that may please philosophers or men 
of very abstract ideas? There is doubtless a naked 
quiddity bereft of traits that would be convenient to 
think of under some proper philosophical term ; but 
this quiddity is not matter. I am speaking soberly 
when I say, that a cherry is matter. I am speaking 
more soberly yet when I say, that a cherry is in part 
sensation. Here shall be again a time to tell what I 
mean by that. I do not mean much metaphysically. 
And yet I do mean much in the way of clearing meta- 
physical idea. When I ask, What is matter? I mean, 
What does that word portend ? I do not mean, What 
ought it to portend ? or, What would be a completer 
or more advanced sense to agree upon under that 
vocable ? I mean; What is matter ? And with what- 
ever metaphysical refinement I state that which it 
does not really mean, I inflict a wrong, for all these 
appellatives have an unbounded right to be philoso- 
phized upon in the absolute sense in which they are 
consciously conceived. For example, a cherry. What 
do I call a cherry? Do I conceive a naked ens, that 
bears the red color, and is cause of the round shape, 
and that lies metaphysically under it? Or do T, 
philosopher though I were, include the red surface ? 
It is a question of the use of speech. And I answer it 
without a moment's hesitation. A cherry is a cherry, 



208 Ontology, [Book III. 

not as a metaphysical ens, but ruddiness and all ; I 
mean by that, when I say, A cherry, I mean a ruby 
surface as part of the idea that I put into the very 
term. 

You may say, This is a mere question of philology. 
That is the very idea that I wish to impress. When I 
speak of matter, I mean, as my habitual sense, the ens 
WITH its qualities, the cherry as partly color ; I mean 
by that, as I look upon the fruit, My sensation in the 
conscious sense is an actual part of my working appel- 
lative of cherry. We have reached therefore this far 
at once, that the not-self in the sense of what is entirely 
material includes sensation, and, therefore, is partly a 
consciousness (see B. III. Chap. II.) and therefore 
intuitively known (see B. II. Chap. III.) just to the ex- 
tent that the speech we make of it takes in our senses. 

But now a cherry takes-in our senses to a very 
small degree. If I stand off and look at it, there is a 
patch of ruddiness. That patch has breadth and sur- 
face and varieties of hue. I am conscious of the peach 
that much ; and I say, conscious of the peach, because 
usage has actually chosen to put that much in the 
peach as a part of its meaning. If any body doubts 
it, it is mere logomachy. We lay the stress simply to 
be clear. Men talk of consciousness of self, and intui- 
tion of an external world, simply from this usage, that 
from the peasant up, always as we shall hereafter see, 
they choose to put consciousness into their idea of 
self, and pink and scarlet into their idea of the exter- 
nal world. 

Ruddiness, however, is but a small part of the 
peach. How do we form the rest? (2.) We resort to 
recurrence. How does recurrence build for us ? This 
is a pleasant side-question. Does it put-in actual 



Chap. XXXIV.] Self and Not-Self Complex Ideas. 209 

recurrences? Or does it transmute them into imagined 
sense? We think, the latter. The back and sides of 
the peach are imagined ruddinesses like the front. 
And here let me assert again ; — These are actual parts 
of the peach. The front was a sensation. It was, there- 
fore, the directest consciousness. The back is not a sen- 
sation. It is not even a recurrence. But it is what 
recurrence was helping us to of an imagined red. And 
these, let me say, are actual parts of the peach. Now 
take in all other senses. We have been speaking only 
of color. We have prepared the way that all may crowd 
in. Imagine touch with all its remembrance, — and 
scent, and sound. Our word-making seems to part 
with nothing. Consult your consciousness. In the 
very meaning of the peach you pack all you think of; 
the color, and its interior look, the hue it would have if 
you should open it, and the hue it would have behind 
it, and the grain, and the touch, and the surface ; — 
inspect your consciousness ; that is the most prudent 
test as to what you put into your meaning of a peach. 

(3.) Now, as the actual fact, these images are all in 
order. 

A bullock in a pasture is known to lick his flesh, 
and to lick the flesh of his companions, till a great quan- 
tity of hair is carried into his maw, and, usually, with no 
other effect than what might betide any other foreign 
substance. But sometimes, as a rare result, the hair 
adds to itself the attribute of order. By a strange 
felting process, that Darwin might envy for his proto- 
plasm, the hair takes on a form. That which piece by 
piece is but a hair, webs itself into a cone. It is but 
hair after all. But who shall say that this exquisite 
shape is not more? Ideally I mean, the hair and this 
growth of the hair have the divinest differences. And 



210 Ontology. [Book III. 

so now in matter ; the baldest sense, a single ray 
shot here, or a single touch felt there, are very differ- 
ent ideals from that felted sense which binds these five 
messengerings together. 

(4.) And now we rejoice to note exactly what the 
old thinkers meant by species or images. They meant 
truth. The moderns who discard it all have fallen into 
error. Images are precisely the way in which the mind 
arrives at external things. Images moreover are real. 
That is to say, not only does the mind frame an image 
of external things, but it throws the name over it ; 
that is, arriving at a cherry by having its image, I put 
the image in the cherry ; that is, I give the name to 
that which includes the image. 

For example, I see a cherry. That is my first con- 
sciousness. It might have been touch. It might have 
been taste. I might have shut my eye, and some 
baby-trifler might have fed me with a cherry. It mat- 
ters not. Eye or hand, my first thought is a sensation. 
That first thought is the cherry, — I mean, a part of it. 
What care I what the philosopher says ? He may say, 
My eye has never seen the cherry, and my hand has 
never touched it. And he may prove all he says. 
That is to say, descanting upon molecular realities, he 
may show me that hand and fruit molecularly have 
been hedged away. I care nothing at all. What I am 
descanting about is the name. The name cherry, even 
with the philosopher who talks so well, includes the 
sense. The ruddiness on which his eye falls, is part 
of the fruit ; and when he takes it in his hand, the 
sphericity that resists his touch is the boundary of the 
thing. That is, the bundle of its traits is swept into 
his speech, and is included under the definition that is 
made. 



Chap. XXXIV.] Self and Not-Self Complex Ideas. 2 1 1 

Now this bundle is the image. Like the cone in 
the ox it is a something that is more than the hair ; 
not more in essence, but more in thinking. The 
image that I frame is either, first, sensation, or, second, 
the thought of it which I bring up by recurrence ; and 
though each gleam may be of small effect, like each 
hair in the maw of the ox, yet, felted into one, it 
makes an image ; that image is by an order that is in 
nature; that image is of the most conscious that I 
possess; that image has been the dream of the past; 
and that image is the true philosophy: when I look 
upon this stove, the working word, STOVE, keeps in it 
the front and the sides that I put in it by sensation 
and recurrence. 

(5.) But now, having such an image, an immensity 
is added to it by an empirically discovered permanence. 

This is the progeny of recurrence. 

Having a sensation of which I am directly con- 
scious, it was noticed how the rest was put into the 
cherry by recurrent memory. Shifted, however. I 
think I am conscious that it is not a memory that I 
put into the fruit, but an imagined copy. I see the 
front : I imagine sides that shall be like it. But the 
more beautiful what memory does do in fabricating 
permanence ! That is an immense stride in idealiza- 
tion. The image as a flash is a wonderful harmony; 
but if the image lives ! The stove with its black bulk, — 
that seems more to think of than any one feeling of 
its surface ; but if the stove stands there ! And see, 
This is really nothing but perception. The cone in the 
maw of the ox is nothing but hair. Let us look at 
this suspiciously. The stove ! — it is in part a bundle of 
images. And when we speak of permanence, what do 
we mean by that? At first, but a permanence of 



212 Ontology. [Book III. 

images. I see a house. I have learned distance in 
space. I remember a house. I have learned distance 
in time. And all the intervening length whether of 
time or space is filled up by experience. We are not 
going to teach that all being is perception ; but see 
how we can go very far without putting anything into 
the name but sense and recurrent permanence. 

(6.) But now permanence begins to mutiny. Per- 
manence is a thing that requires food and clothes, and 
something more solid than mere perception. The 
image of a stove is a very solid looking thing, and the 
remembered image of a stove is very real, but what 
does it do for itself when no one is looking? That it 
drops out of existence we cannot think, for we believe 
it permanent just as we believe the analogy of the 
bells (see B. II. Chap. VIII.). It is not a conscious- 
ness, but an experience ; and if it should not be per- 
manent, and we looked and it had entirely vanished, 
it would only be a stoppage of the bells after a century 
of ringing. But if permanent, what lasts ? Certainly 
not the idea ; for there is no one looking. We are 
forced off into Ontology. Being is not idealized. We 
are not conscious of it. We are not looking at it ; I 
mean as ultra ideal ; but that word SOMETHING de- 
scribes its origin. Mill dared wildly to sa^, that possi- 
bility was the word, — that self was a possibility of 
sensation, — that the peach was a possibility of being 
seen, — that the stove, in order to live between-whiles, 
was a possibility to be seen when we felt free to look 
at it ; but, alas for Mill ! this is but tantum per tanto. 
It is scarce as good as our word something ; for while 
possibili y is but a repeating of the case, something 'is a 
modest disclaimer of our being able to say much : it is 



Chap. XXXIV.] Self and Not-Self Complex Ideas. 2 1 3 

a convenient trunk, into which we can pack many an 
understood analogy. 

7. For example, power ; — that begins to toll us off 
from pure and mere idea. 

Power is conceived of in our consciousness (see 
B. III. Chap. XXIV.). Then it wanders off from there, 
and is seen in its analogies. There is power in my 
arm. That I feel. There is power in another man's 
arm. There is power in the wind. There is power in 
the heat. How vague the analogy at last becomes. 
Finally there is power in the cherry. I saw it last 
night : I see it again now. Has it existed all that 
time? Yes. Did you see it? No. Has anybody 
seen it? No. How has it existed? Why, surely not 
as a consciousness ; but as a something, and as a some- 
thing with power. And though the images no longer 
serve us, rotund and solid though they seem, yet they 
have done the arguing for us as to something perma- 
nent ; and though we have to drop them out of the 
picture when the stove ceases to be imaged, yet they 
leave these vague analogies of power and of permanence 
and oi something ticaX. continues to be there. 

8. Nor must we go on from just this spot in Ontol- 
ogy without setting in its right shape that much abused 
term of quality. It is indeed three terms, the first two 
meaning the same thing numerically, the last meaning 
nothing of the kind. The first means a quality of the 
sense, as when we speak of the shrillness of a certain 
sound, or the sweetness of a certain taste ; and even then 
we must state that it is the heard sound and the felt 
taste ; for these words wander incessantly in objective 
ways. The second means precisely the same thing, 
but turned objectively. There is a tendency we have 
seen to put our sensations into the object. Thus blue 



214 Ontology. [Book III. 

is blue, and all the dictionaries in the world cannot 
make it anything conscious but a color. Yet the color 
is imputed to the heavens, and that as a conscious- 
ness. It goes as a paint all over it ; nay, dictionary- 
wise, right into it. There is a second meaning there- 
fore to the term. The same color is a quality of my 
sense, and a quality, by the habit of men's speech, of 
exterior matter ; though the same conscious blueness, 
numerically meant, is that which is present in my mind 
and painted on the sky. Palsy my power of sight, 
and the two would fade at once, proving their identity. 
But the third would survive. And this will make things 
a great deal clearer. The third is the mere power to 
awake the others. There is vast confusion from not 
having detected this dictionary-difference. The first 
and second are a sense. The third is not even a con- 
sciousness. And yet they are all called qualities. A 
quality in the third sense is a mere imagined potence 
to project the blue, or to awake the sound, or to pro- 
duce the taste upon the healthy organization.* 

Therefore at this stage of Ontology, if a man says, 
we are conscious of qualities, but we are not conscious 
of substance, we must ask him what he means. If he 

* Now, one word here. We have said that consciousness goes into 
our idea of self, and that ruddiness goes into our idea of the cherry. So, 
let it be observed, these three dictionary-meanings of quality are more 
or less fused together. The mere consciousness, color, trajects itself we 
have seen, and becomes object-wise ; and the more genetic meaning, viz. 
that which produces the consciousness, like the cherry itself, becomes 
suffused with the consciousness itself; so that all three meanings are 
with difficulty abstracted from each other. It would be difficult to say 
that color is not a sensation, and yet we rather say, Sensation of color ; so 
obstinately does the mind speak object-wise of its different sensations. 

Let me entreat, however, attention to this fact ; — these are dictionary 
questions ; not points about which consciousness differs outside of our 
speech. 



Chap. XXXIV.] Self and Not-Self Complex Ideas. 2 1 5 

means qualities in the earlier senses, we have nothing 
to say; but if he means qualities in the third, he is 
utterly at fault, for we are conscious of substance as a 
dictionary thing, for it includes qualities in those ear- 
lier forms ; but we are not conscious of quality at all, 
I mean of quality in its third sense, that is, simply of 
the power by which a thing seems blue, or is the in- 
strument of God in projecting the blueness or project- 
ing the sound or enkindling the taste upon the mind. 

II. We are not ready for our last assertions, and, 
therefore, we will go on, and close this chapter with 
what is the second great, head of it, viz. Self. 

(1.) Self includes consciousness. This is the 
great philologic fact. We have seen that the cherry in- 
cludes ruddiness. These are things of the Lexicon. 
We do not say that they might not have been differ- 
ent. When I say, I am conscious of self, I mean con- 
scious of self understood as that word must mean. 
And when I say, I see a cherry, I mean that I see what 
that word cherry answers to ; and I must know what 
that word cherry answers to, before I know whether I 
really see it. 

Now that I see a cherry depends upon the fact 
that its ruddiness is a part of its idea ; with the cherry 
a very slender part. The ruddiness is a mere patch 
of light ; and a vast deal idealistically has to be fabri- 
cated from the region of recurrence. 

It is not so with the ego. The ego is all the con- 
sciousness. Let me be understood ; — The word ego, or 
to speak more plainly the whole idea of myself, includes 
my consciousness, and not, as in the instance of the 
cherry, a patch of sense, but the w T hole contents of the 
spirit ; the whole existing consciousness goes by the 
law of the Lexicon into myself at the time. 



216 Ontology. [Book III. 

In the instance of the cherry, recurrence brought up 
and finished the fruit by imagined sensations. In the 
instance of self, all goes in directly. Whatever my 
mind is conscious of at the time, enters for that time 
into my idea of ego. 

Do not debate now ! Deny or reject or declare 
that this speech contradicts your dictionary. That is 
the direction which we are now travelling. But if you 
admit that practically it is actually the case, — that is 
all I care for. I say, that, as my mother taught me, I 
have learned to count self, conscious self. And, there- 
fore, when I speak of self, I am not remembering 
whether some other self would be more for science, 
but I am speaking of the self I know. The self I know, 
includes the thoughts. 

(2.) Now, though recurrent thought is conscious, 
and, therefore, makes up my consciousness, yet it does 
more for the felt ego than this. It not only adds its vol- 
ume to the consciousness which is self, but it also tells 
facts about it ; that is, as in the instance of the stove, 
it brings out the idea of permanence. 

(3.) In like manner, power. The stove is permanent. 
Why? Is any one looking at it? No. Possibility is 
the word with Mill. The stove is not looked at, but 
it has a possibility to be looked at. That is its per- 
manence. But we, claiming a vast many other experi- 
ences, lay emphasis upon the fact of power. It has a 
power to be looked at ; and that helps the thought of 
being. And so now in the instance of the ego ; — not 
only is it all our consciousness, but, if forced to give up 
that, and if a race should arise that should change the 
dictionary and shrink self into a naked ens, we would 
make much of the idea of power. The stove has 
power to be visible. I never knew it except visually; 



Chap. XXXV.] Language and the Idea of Being. 2 1 7 

or, otherwise, never, except tactually ; but I know by 
likeness that it has a power. And if the stove has 
power, why not I ? I never think stoves if not in part 
as images, and I never think self if not in part as con- 
sciousness; but if the stove has power to project these 
images, why not I to receive them ? and, moreover, if 
the stove sends images, and has therefore efficient 
strength, why have not I also ? for as the stove sends 
images to me, so do I to myself in those perpetual 
recurrences which something or Other is printing and 
sending to my eye. 

Now this is all very slender, but it will help what 
was more fully treated before. It is very slender, 
because we have singled out but one sense. The stove 
is a hulk of images, and the ego a maze of conscious- 
ness. Nevertheless one is just like the other. Both, 
as words, take in consciousness. Neither, as things, is 
confined to it. Both are like in travelling out from it. 
And neither could advance an inch but on that principle 
of the bell (B. II. Chap. VIII.), which, beginning with 
the sense, travels out empirically on the strength of 
likeness. 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

EFFECT OF LANGUAGE ON THE IDEA OF BEING. 

Mere language makes self include consciousness, 
and makes the not-self, so far as it is material, include 
the instant sensation. We have no questions to ask 
as to whether this is for the best. " Vox populi, vox 
Dei." In all languages, so far as we are aware, the 
words for being include the consciousnesses that 
reveal it at the time. 

To men of perfectly sharp minds this would make 
no difference. The philosophic entity could be treated, 
10 



2l8 Ontology. [Book III. 

whether cherry included its red color, or whether ego 
included my existent consciousness, or whether it did 
not. It is only a question of the Lexicon ; though 
the formation of the Lexicons of all language indicates 
in the most striking way that path of thought which 
enters the domain of being. 

All men have not sharp minds, however ; and in the 
maze of Metaphysics no man has a particularly sharp 
mind ; and, therefore, the meaning of terms, though it 
can be conventionally agreed, has had a most potential 
way of warping knowledge. 

I. In the first place, self, including consciousness, 
and yet coming afterward to be dreamed of as a naked 
entity, has started with a sort of scorn at any one who 
has spoken of it as not conscious. If I were to declare, 
You are not conscious of yourself, you would cry and 
stop your ears. And yet this is but the effect of lan- 
guage. Ever since the world began, self has included 
consciousness ; and now, when metaphysicians dig and 
conceive an ens inside of our conscious thinking, that is 
seized upon as though it were the genuine philosophic 
self, and, not remembering that then language has to 
change, we utter an outcry of horror if a man says we 
are not conscious of the ego. 

II. And so of the non-ego. These are useful words 
even in their popular sense. The non-ego, in the cases 
where it is wholly matter, takes in, as we have already 
seen, the mere sensation. It takes in the whole bundle 
of recurrent images. This is a grand help, (i) It 
gives unitariness to our speech ; and (2) it introduces 
the peasant by easy stage to the idea of being. But it 
has proportioned evils. It breeds chapters of mistake. 
It has seduced men since the time of Plato. Having 
intuition of a cherry ; being sure that I see it ; having 



Chap. XXXVI.] Are we Conscious of the Not-Self? 219 

consciousness that I am in its very presence ; so long 
as a cherry includes sensation, my dictum is complete ; 
but thought steals in and cuts off the quiddity, and 
sheers away what is conscious from the fruit, and yet 
still spends its time in inquiring how I have certainty 
of the cherry. 

The remedy lies in the speech. Changing the 
speech, I must change my intellection. Taking hue 
out of the peach, and looking at it in metaphysic guise, 
I must cease to see it. And so of the ego. Robbing 
it of consciousness ; I mean by that, taking out of the 
word a thought-current as part of its signification ; and 
we relegate it into the inane. After that it is not con- 
scious. Then it becomes a spirit like God. We be- 
lieve in it, like angels. And for a man to say he is 
conscious of himself, is a mere tripping up upon the 
old idea. 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

CAN WE BE SAID TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE NOT-SELF? 

We are ready, therefore, for all those questions 
about the domain of consciousness. 

It seems that matter is an object of consciousness 
because, as the actuality of speech, the word matter 
includes sensation. I am conscious of matter because 
I am conscious of its hue ; or I am conscious of matter 
because I am conscious of its image, and its image, 
grouping all that is sensational together, is an integral 
part of the defined reality. 

Other parts, however, are not sensational. The 
image is mostly made up of the past. Of the ruddi- 
ness of the peach I am distinctly conscious; and if 
that is the peach, I am conscious of the peach. But 



220 Ontology. [Book III. 

of the back of the peach I am not conscious. It is 
made up of images. They are fashioned from the 
past. And though they are integral parts of the 
peach ; I mean lexically : yet I am not conscious 
of them ; for they are not like the ruddiness I see, 
actual facts, but they are likelihoods ; that is to say, 
whether they are ruddy or white I cannot settle till 
I actually see them. 

So of permanence ; and so, above all, of power. 
They have drifted further from consciousness. We 
will explain how far, under another chapter. So, above 
all, of entity. When the philosopher comes in, and 
sheers away all that is of the image, an entity is con- 
ceived, and of that there should be no pretence that 
we can at all be conscious. 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 

CAN WE BE SAID TO BE CONSCIOUS OF SELF? 

If the appellative, self, includes our existing con- 
sciousness, of course, as we have already explained, we 
are conscious of self. And as consciousness is very 
large, we are conscious of very much of self, — far more 
than of the not-self as matter. 

Ego signifies all of consciousness. The non-ego 
does not. Hence in common language we are said to 
be conscious of self, but we are not said to be con- 
scious of a cherry. 

We are conscious of a cherry just in a patch of 
ruddiness, a sort of umbilical feeding of the main idea. 
We are conscious of self all over. And this is the 
answer we give to the above inquiry. We are con- 
scious of self as a dictionary word including all our 
consciousness at the time. But as a philosophic ens, 



Chap. XXXVIIL] Being, not all Perception. 221 

if thought succeeds in divorcing it from all our con- 
sciousness, we are not conscious of it at all. But as a 
thought-bearer, just as a stove may be conceived as an 
image-bearer, as an original esse, inside of conscious- 
ness, and yet outside of God, and given by Him effici- 
ency to breed our thinking, it is dead as Dido ; it is 
outside of all our image-making : we have no look 
into its face: we look into its being as we do into God 
who made us. 



CHAPTER XXXVIIL 

IS BEING NOTHING BUT PERCEPTION? 

This seems an obstinate going back to an offensive 
scepticism ; but we are guilty of it in order to gather 
up every crumb of the required empiricism. 

All that man knows he must perceive. All that he 
perceives he is conscious of; moreover his perceptions 
of whatever sort, as was long ago determined (B. I. 
Chap. VIII.), are throughout a consciousness. There- 
fore, if we perceive being, must it not be all percep- 
tion ? inasmuch as all perception is all a consciousness? 
We are at a state when this difficulty can be gotten 
over, and, we think, finely and finally. 

A cherry is being. Ruddiness in our conscious 
thought of it is part of it ; and, therefore, so far as a 
cherry is ruddiness, it is a perception. But ruddiness 
is but a small part of it ; and there are back and sides 
and juice and pulp and pit and ten-thousand-concourse 
of images. What are these images? Sensations? 
They are not even recurrences. They are images of 
recurrences ; and what our mind asserts when it fits 
them to the peach is that they are parts of it like the 
ruddiness. But am I conscious of them ? Let me 



222 Ontology. [Book III. 

ask another question. Am I conscious of the ringing 
which having continued every five minutes for a thou- 
sand years I perceive will ring the next minute? Behold 
the answer! — Perception is the unlucky term. I really 
mix things when I consent to use it. I do not really 
perceive the ringing that is to be the next moment. If 
I did, it would be all a consciousness. The ringing 
this moment is all sensation, and of every wave of it I 
am squarely conscious. But the ringing that is to be 
is a faith. Now let me transfer this, and we can become 
very lucid. The patch of ruddiness is the peach, that 
is, according to the vocabulary, it is a conscious part 
of it. Therefore that much is perception. But of the 
back and sides of the peach think a moment. It is 
just like the ringing of the bell. The ringing next 
moment is a faith. The back of the cherry is a faith. 
I do not even know the color of it. No, not the fact 
of it ! I have a sensation of the front, and that sensa- 
tion two things, — first, the hue of it, and, second, the 
fact of it. And now of the back what have I ? De- 
cidedly a consciousness ; and that consciousness is all 
a perception. But a perception of what ? A perception 
of the exact mental phenomena. What are the men- 
tal phenomena? They are conscious recurrences. Is 
that the peach ? No. What more are they ? They 
are facts about these recurrences ; for of all the facts, 
as in blueness and redness, we are supremely conscious. 
What are these facts ? First, their conscious analogies. 
What more? Second, the order that they keep. Give 
us, therefore, four things ; first absolute consciousness- 
es ; second, among these, conscious recurrences ; third, 
among these, visible likeness ; and, fourth, among these 
like things, conscious order, — and Ontology becomes a 
thing of prediction. The front of the cherry is a con- 



Chap. XXXVIII.] Being, not all Perception. 223 

sciousness; but all beside is predicted probability, — 
which might actually deceive, — a framing of faith on 
the base of experienced, recurrence. 

How, still it may be shouted out, does anybody get 
the ens from the image ? the granite from the soap 
bubble ? Thought is one thing. Iron is another. 
Where does the latter come from ? And our antago- 
nists may press in upon us, and crowd us in this ex- 
tremest moment with the question, Where did you get 
the iron? Our answer is, We have not gotten the iron 
at all. Thought is all mine. I see every part of it. 
Iron is not all mine. I see scarce any of it. What I do 
see is thought. Beyond thought I do not see the iron. 
By thought I get a faith in it. As thought I have seen 
power. As thought I have seen permanence. A bun- 
dle of thought has made an image. The iron would be 
mere thought, were it not that discovered order, and 
experienced analogy, and detected difference (all these 
mere thoughts), had pushed me beyond thought into 
the region of empirical believing. A rock first reports 
to me as light ; but when I infer permanence where there 
is no light, I am forced to conceive of something not 
light that abides in the absence of my vision. 

This something I am not conscious of. It is a made 
up thing. I do not possess it sensibly, as I do my 
consciousness. I assert it as I do the future ringing 
of the bell. And if any one says, Yes, but it is an 
entity ; and that is very different from perception, — I 
say, Yes, but the difference is what perception asserts. 
And if he adds, It is so different as to be genetically 
incapable of such a birth, I bring him to pause by ask- 
ing, —Specifically what is it ? He soon begins to de- 
scribe it in terms of consciousness ; so that when power 
and hue and bulk and weight and permanence, all of 



224 Ontology. [Book III. 

which are consciousnesses, all combine, he has nothing 
beyond, except SOMETHING, that he can assert of being. 

And that something is just the same discovery in 
the instance of the ego. The ego as consciousness is of 
course perception and nothing more. The ego as some- 
thing that has consciousness is an empiric functionary, 
permanent because we trace it when out of thought, — 
powerful because acting and acted on, these being sim- 
ply consciousnesses, — a being, because it IS all that it is 
consciously discerned to be, — an existence, because it 
stands out in imagined separateness like matter, — and 
a substance as some men call it, as though it did really 
resist, and had power for impinging upon the body. 

Now these are all shadows. They go by the tether 
of consciousness. They go as far as that will lead 
them. That fact is seen in the very terms that we 
employ. And when consciousness leaves them, we 
embrace the 6n rather than the 6v. We no longer see 
anything direct. But like a hand holding us out of the 
window, consciousness holds us out into the inane, that 
we may affirm by analogy and experience that there is 
something more and different to what perception itself 
can squarely bring under its eye. 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 

IS THE ID .A OF THE NOT-SELF INTUITIVE OR EMPIRICAL? 

INTUITIVE and empirical are terms of Logic. That 
is intuitive which I know directly. Whether the not- 
self is intuitive, depends upon the question whether I 
know directly all or any part of it? That we have 
settled already. It makes little difference inherently ; 
but philologically our minds are conscious that we do 
attribute to the word stove a patch of the present 



Chap. XXXIX.] Is Not-Self Intuitive or Empirical f 225 

sensation. So far therefore our question is answered. 
The idea of a not-me is intuitive so far as it takes in a 
patch of the present sensation. 

But how is it, farther? Here let me divide. We 
go farther by asserted analogy ; and we go farther, 
beyond a doubt, also, by asserted difference. Both of 
these assertions, let me be careful to say, are not by 
any separate faculty, but by mere experience. 

We go farther by asserted analogy. I see a black 
surface, and it is part of a stove. I fill up behind it, 
and that is the other part : but the first part I see. The 
other part I only think of. Moreover I only think of 
it in analogy. The rotund back is as much the stove 
as the rotund front, though both are images; but 
the one is just as I see it. The other is in but uncer- 
tain analogy. It may be brown. It may be rusted. 
It may be broke ; I cannot tell. It is a mere analogy. 
Nevertheless it is a part of the stove. And it is a 
part aimed at by analogy, such that I dream that if I 
stood where I could see it, it would be a part of the 
image, and as such (as an ancient species) would make 
part under that vocable, a stove. 

But now a deeper part comes in by difference. 

We hug sense for one. We dream out away from 
sense to supply the other. 

For example, the stove. It endures when we are 
not looking. Why ? Because we endure. And we 
learn that largely by the body. We trace its perma- 
nence. It comes out by facts of consciousness. The 
indicia are immense. We will not repeat them. We 
are forced to have signs of permanence without con- 
sciousness ; and that sets us at what ? Why, at 
asserting likeness with difference. These are the 
thought-carriers. We are carried by likeness to the 
10* 



226 Ontology. [Book III. 

limits of consciousness, and then we are projected off, 
and forced by what we have called intermediate analo- 
gies (B. II. Chap. X.) to assert a something of which 
we have no consciousness. 

The not-self, therefore, is in one single patch intui- 
tive ; in the rest of a rotund image it is by partial 
analogy: as a metaphysical essence it is more empiri- 
cal still, and results from tenuous likeness carried the 
very farthest off and there forced -to assert a difference 
in a needful something that must have permanence 
with no consciousness at all. 



CHAPTER XL. 

IS THE IDEA OF SELF INTUITIVE OR EMPIRICAL? 

ALL is plainer in the instance of self. The idea 
of self is intuitive so long as men persist in putting 
into it the idea of consciousness ; but when it gets 
to the launching-off place it has to shift as in the 
instance of matter. It is bred of likeness. It is bred 
likewise of asserted difference. I think of self as con- 
scious in the past. There of course it is analogy. 
And there of course it is empirical. I do not see the 
past. I am not conscious of what was conscious then. 
It comes up to me by recurrence. And though, like 
the back of the stove, past consciousness goes in to my 
image of myself, it is a matter of empiricism. I no 
more see myself in my existence yesterday than the 
back of the stove, and may make the same mistakes 
about it as to its minuter consciousness. But now the 
stove, when I am no longer looking, and my body, 
when I am fast asleep, and my neighbor, who has his 
own separate consciousness, all cluster their evidences 
upon me, and force me to think of a self that is not con- 



Chap. XLL] Are we Certain of our Existence? 227 

scious. How does it look you may ask me ? It does 
not look at all: Then of what is it conscious ? It is 
not conscious at all. Then what is it ? Genetically 
analogy and difference. State that more carefully. 
Well, take that sentence, — a self that is 7tot conscious ; 
take ten thousand other sentences ; take all the facts 
that are bred of a countless experience : try to sink 
them as a boy does when he tries to go under ; con- 
sent to my terms that they are not conscious ens, and 
try to annul them such as they are ; and when you see 
that like the hair they are webbed into a cone, and all 
agree to the very uttermost accord, take that for self, 
that is, the asserted something that must endure in the 
absence of the present consciousness. 

CHAPTER XLI. 

ARE WE CERTAIN OF OUR OWN EXISTENCE ? 

Take self as partly consciousness, and we are cer- 
tain of that much of self as is constituently conscious : 
but take self as a metaphysical ens, and we are not cer- 
tain of it at all. 

If I am asked, Are you certain there is any such 
city as London ? I would say, Yes ; because, for prac- 
tical purposes, I am sure enough. But if any one begs 
me to speak definitely, I would say I am not certain 
of it at all. And if any one begs me to give my logi- 
cal intent I would say, It is impossible to be certain 
of anything but my immediate consciousness. 

Now my belief in the City is precisely akin to my 
belief in myself. 

If any one exclaims at this, let me ask : — Might I not 
be mistaken ? London is a tale. To most people it is 
a mere averment. Do men never tell lies? Suppose 



228 Ontology. [Book III. 

all the world had united to deceive me. You may say, 
That is not possible : and I admit that, in the sense of 
the highest conceivable percent. There is not the ten 
millionth of a probability that the world has vitiated 
its maps. Nevertheless the conception is possible. 
The world may have been in conspiracy ever since I 
was born to deceive me on this subject of London. 
Moreover, I have been there. God may have deceived 
me. I mean by all to show that consciousness is a 
direct intuition. God cannot make it true that I have 
not the experience of light as I mark these strokes upon 
the sheet of paper. But empiricism is a faith built 
upon order. The order may deceive me, and things 
cease to be predicable upon that base which has been 
a sheer experience. 

So now of my own existence. Is it consciousness? 
Ah then I know it certainly. Is it a substantial ens ? 
God might be utterly deceiving me. He might make 
my present consciousness by the flash of an immediate 
power. Can any one deny it ? He might make my 
immediate consciousness and nothing in the world 
beside. And in that consciousness is memory, which 
would be a mistake, and sensation, and image-making, 
and belief in the past, and belief in self and body and 
all my present harmonies, and yet it would be all a lie, 
God having chosen to create a consciousness like a flying 
seraph with no basis of life on which it could sit down. 

You may say, He might not deceive us. There 
again is empiricism. Confidence in Heaven is never 
the terminal fact, but confidence in consciousness : 
when that is past, conscious probability is all that is left, 
higher and stronger like the likeness of the two doves, 
or like the probabilities of the bell that has been ring- 
ing a thousand years. 



Chap. XLIL] Are we Certain of Other Existences f 229 
CHAPTER XL1I. 

ARE WE CERTAIN OF ANYBODY ELSE'S EXISTENCE? 

The cherry as partly ruddiness we are absolutely 
sure of. All beyond, not so. 

I might go into a house. Who says I am certain 
of the house ? I am certain of my consciousnesses, and 
nothing more. 

I might own the house, walk its porches, sack its 
pantries, feel its fires, yea, have all my growth from 
infancy to a dotard's age inside of that house, — and 
never be sure of a single timber. Nay I will force 
you to admit it; for I have only to ask, Could not the 
Almighty make me believe I had a house? Could He 
not raise Samuel when there was no Samuel there ? 
Could he not come as a tired man (Judges vi. 11) when 
He came as a God ? Could He not wrestle at the 
Ford Jabbok (Gen. xxxii. 24), with no molecules in 
His form, and with no flesh upon His bones ? And in 
my life-long home could He not make it all a dream to 
me? He could not make me conscious of that of 
which I was not conscious ; and that is the bourne of 
the intuitive; but He could make me dream of any 
not-me, and fill up all its consciousnesses as of a score 
of years, and there not be a back to any front, or an 
instant of existence beyond the point where I was 
looking on. 

The not-self, therefore, is well defined. Where it 
is sense, I know it. But as a physical ens, it is only 
empirically believed. 



230 Ontology. [Book III. 

CHAPTER XLIII. 

INTUITIVE BELIEFS, SO-CALLED, UNDER THE LIGHT OF ONTOLOGY. 

We are now prepared to dispense with that jury- 
mast in metaphysical sailing, viz. Intuitive Beliefs. 

We are now prepared to charge it with three in- 
competencies. First, it is not conceivable. 

It is intended to make the trajectory from the me 
to the not-me, and of course, that is very essential. 
To do so it cuts away all other tackle by which that 
journey can be made ; and that might seem very rea- 
sonable. In doing so, it denies that the journey is 
made with any terminus ad quern ; I mean with any pro- 
fessed arrival at a conscious idea. Cause, for exam- 
ple. I believe it ; I do not see it. And so of other 
examples. Our great averment against the system is 
that it is utterly inconceivable. 

We must set a guard, however. There has been 
a false synopsis. That two and two are four, — that is 
conceivable. Regulative Faculty or not, the mind un- 
doubtedly perceives that much, — and that a whole is 
greater than its part. If you like that style of getting 
forward we are willing to admit, that we were born 
with that much faculty, viz. a faculty, if we know that 
a thing is, to know that it is, which is all that we can 
get out of the axiom that it is impossible for the same 
thing to be and not to be. Such things are the bald- 
est truisms. And if it were left to these, universals 
never could have reigned so long in Logic. 

It is those other maxims, — that quality implies 
substance, — and that changes require efficiency, — that 
have made the Regulative Faculty seem at all worth 
while ; for while these truisms have seemed to make 



Chap. XLIIL] Intuitive Beliefs and Ontology. 231 

it precise, these later maxims render it aggressive. 
That the whole is greater than its part is sterile ; but 
that quality requires substance is philosophically pro- 
lific. Now, I say, there is no such Intuitive Belief: 
first, because, by the admission of its friends, there is 
no conceivable idea. This is the thought that will 
pull down the castle. Substance, what is it? S-u-b- 
s-t-a-n-c-e is a file of letters. Put an idea in it, and it 
is a matter for belief. But it is a weapon for a child 
that will arm him against the most honored reasoners 
if he is able to ask, How can I believe in that of 
which I have no idea ? 

The first argument therefore against the system 
is, that it is in terms meaningless. 

. II. The second argument is, that it is practically 
false. 

Here are Moses and Elias on the top of Tabor. 
These men exhibit, so the doctrinists say, certain phe- 
nomena about their persons which are merely mental; 
that is to say, I, looking on, see, not Moses, but .certain 
colors, and the fact that there is a substantial patriarch 
is by an innate faculty, or, as these scientists tell us, by 
an Intuitive Belief. But query now, Is there a sub- 
stantial patriarch ? Elias was carried to heaven, but 
Moses died on Nebo. It is sane to think that Moses 
was disembodied. Suppose it were so. These men 
distinctly aver that qualities imply substance. They 
will not leave it to empiric steps, but leap toward it 
as a fact universal. Now, abandoning our first diffi- 
culty, that the thing is inconceivable, let us press this 
last. How can I be born to certainty that qualities 
imply substance, when here are two saints, the very 
thread on whose vestments seems alike, and yet one 
may be bones and flesh, and the other a floating phan- 



232 Ontology. [Book III. 

tasm of whatever sort may be put forward by the 
Almighty? 

Nor can it be replied that this is a fine illustration 
of the very doctrine impeached. These men may say, 
We have confessed we have no idea. What Moses 
was, and what Elias was, we have no conception. 
That is the very nature of the belief. That Moses is 
the same as the other, we can never know. But all 
the better does it illustrate our doctrine, that the mind 
reaches to universals, and asserts that neither patriarch 
is mere phenomena; that underneath the color of his 
hair there must be an actual something; and that 
neither figure can be a mere floating sense, but must 
have a ground to stand on in some group of material 
efficiencies. 

But let us not be too bold. 

The hand upon the wall, — did Belshazzar see it? 
In all that part that consists in consciousness he cer- 
tainly saw it, and that is all the part that he did cer- 
tainly see. He certainly saw all that my hand seems 
as I look at it now as it moves over the paper. And 
yet what did he see? These men say, A phantasmic 
something. No, not certainly that. All quality implies 
substance, and these men say there is something effi- 
cient upon the wall; and yet there may have been 
nothing upon the wall. We may pare down the reality 
until we see that there is nothing we can assert except 
the bare consciousness that had arisen in Belshazzar's 
mind. Nay, we who are mere empiricists can assert 
more than the advocates of universals. For universals 
are all or nothing; while we who are empirical in 
belief can have probabilities for faith outside of the 
domain of certainty. 

III. Therefore a third argument. A third argu- 



Chap. XLIIL] Intuitive Beliefs and Ontology. 233 

ment is, that this Faculty has no pretence for its main 
proof, viz. that it is necessary. 

We argue this in several ways. (1) In the first 
place, that is not necessary which is impossible. If I 
can have no belief in that of which I have no idea, then 
the pretension of a leap outwardly is all chimerical. 
Either the me is an idea, or it is not : if it is not, there 
is no possibility for a belief: if it is, where did I get 
it ? The Regulative Faculty is de trop in either event. 
If I have no idea, it has no province. If I have an idea, 
it has no necessity. This is the grand argument. I 
can get my belief where I got my ideas. If I have 
ideas, I know whence I believe them. If I have no 
ideas, I am fighting about English "words, and cause 
and substance are only alphabet. 

(2) In the second place, that plea of necessity is the 
feeblest of all which pretends to be wholly philosophi- 
cal. It is the old scholastic mark. Original truths 
are said to be universal and necessary, and the neces- 
sity, when it comes to be described, is that which is so 
much insisted upon by Hamilton, viz. that of which 
the opposite is unthinkable. Every effect must have 
a cause. Why ? Because the opposite cannot be 
conceived. 

Now what do we mean by that ? 

That the whole is greater than a part is an original 
truth. That I admit. The opposite of it is incon- 
ceivable, and therefore it is necessary. That every 
effect must have a cause is also an original truth if we 
begin by the definition of effect itself as having a cause. 
So of substance. If quality is quality of substance, 
and that is the definition, the inference is plain. All 
quality requires substance ; and we may go on to build 
up aphorisms at pleasure. But what does it all amount 



234 Ontology. [Book III. 

to? Each one on the list is a truism ; and the whole 
and its part, and the cause and its effect, are similarly 
related, the aphorism being stamped as true by the 
force of definition. 

But if, as Sir William does, we go boldly to sea ; if, 
as an actually aggressive argument, we say, Yon ship 
must have had a cause for the fact that the opposite is 
altogether inconceivable ; or, again, that rock must have 
been created because its flashing out just so upon the 
field is beyond our thoughts, — we are giving in to proof 
which will establish altogether too much. What do 
we mean by conceivable ? Do we mean that the phe- 
nomenon cannot be conceived? How then do we 
describe it ? Do you say, it is past your consciousness 
that a rock should flash up without there having been 
any rock before ? It is not past mine. Moreover, it 
is not past yours. Pardon me such an assertion. But 
I deny that it is possible to talk on that of which I 
have no idea. If then I can think of a ship flushing 
out without a creator upon the main, you are driven 
to another position, viz. that it is the how that is 
unthinkable, and then you are in a most atheistic 
attitude, for the how is unthinkable as to its having 
any creator at all. You prove too much, therefore. 
Either it is not fair to argue by the amount of what I 
can conceive, or you sweep everything : — the rock 
itself; the ship; the Deity on high. To think the 
rock without a creator is no whit harder than to think 
it with a creator ; nay, to my thinking, not so hard. I 
can conceive of neither. A lazier thought will reveal 
to me the widow's cruse flooding over as by itself, than 
that farther thinking of a mystic hand to achieve the 
feat by an inconceivable creation. 

Returning to reality, therefore, do we dispense 



Chap. XLIII.] Intuitive Beliefs and Ontology. 235 

with God ? By no means. We prove Him empirically. 
And there are our next reasonings. Intuitive Beliefs 
are not necessary ; for the I and the not-I can both be 
reached in other ways which we have already consid- 
ered. 

(3) As the next step, therefore, conceive of being 
analytically. What do you find in it ? Look over your 
whole Ontology, and tell me, What do you see in self 
or not-self that could not be put there by the facts of 
consciousness? The red color? That is sense. The 
order of shapes and color? That is consciousness. 
The images that are built up by the past? That is all 
recurrence. Permanence? That is all perceived. And 
so is power. Tell me anything in the whole range of 
fact that is not consciousness or its shadowy likeness. 
And as I pile these things in, and surely there is a vast 
accumulation of them, do not say that I have done 
nothing toward being until you at least have described 
something that you have done, or something in part at 
least that you have put into the significance of an In- 
tuitive Belief. I tell you actual thoughts. I depict to 
you obvious images. I show you how they grow out 
of my sense. Do not say I must superadd a Regulative 
Faculty, when you admit that it gives no actual ideas, 
and only avers what in the very necessity of the case 
must be conceived of in some other way. 

(4) And then, synthetically. How do you put your 
world together? I have shown you how I do mine. 
I have been free with all my material. I have shown 
you its grand variety. Outness, for example, and 
otherness ; things that seem mental ; things that look 
difficult, unless they can be catered after by an Intui- 
tive Belief; I have shown you how they are actually 
conscious; how they come up into the sense; and 



236 Ontology. [Book III. 

now match them, and, what is more, give conceptions 
of the things that you believe, or else admit that you 
have been adding what is supposititious, and impairing 
the honor of God in the alphabet He has fixed in the 
mind of His creature. 

We spell out the universe. 

That is not a good figure you say, for thought is 
one thing, and being is another. The mind may be full 
of thought, but that is not being. That is the eternal 
argument. We use it for purposes of recapitulation. 

(1) In the first place, shame on you for using it, — 
you confess that you give us no idea. 

(2) In the second place, if you give us no idea, the 
mind has to depend upon what it has at any rate ; and 
how can it employ your mere idealess belief? 

(3) In the third place, it does not stop at thought, 
but by thought as a great projectile it can assert its 
likenesses. 

(4) Fourth, it does not stop at likeness : but 

(5) Fifth, it is made aware of difference ; and going 
to the verge of the dissimilar, it reports exactly what 
you say, viz. that there is something different from 
thought. And it reports about it all that you pretend ; 
for you pretend to give no additional ideas, but only 
to assert a something, which is exactly what empiricism 
does, a something more and different beyond the 
sphere of a naked consciousness. 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

"perception" in its modern sense a figment, being but an 
instance of intuitive belief, so called. 

THE world has accepted with a wonderful degree 
of unanimity the attempt to turn aside the old meaning 



Chap. XLV.J Sensation as Knowledge. 237 

of perception, and to install a different one. The old 
meaning was ours, and may be described as a general 
term for cognition or thought, and included sensation. 
But as Ontology wrestled with itself there came a 
change. Perception was mable to mean a discerning 
of matter, and sense the mere occasion for it. For 
example, fragrance ; it is a mere brutish sensibility ; 
or taste ; it was plausibly argued, it is possessed by 
animals; or sight, it is a mere color upon the eye. 
The doctrine was, that these were to be called sensa- 
tions ; but following them as the intellectual part, 
came a different power, viz. the perception of matter. 

I need not say that this is our old friend of the 
previous chapter. Every one can recognize it at once. 
It is the old bridge as between the me and the not- 
me. 

And, therefore, three remarks are sufficient. First, 
it cannot do the duty assigned to it. We cannot have 
a perception where we have no idea. Second, if we 
consult our consciousness, we will find that all that we 
directly cognize of the external world is sensation and 
its recurrences. And, thirdly, we shall discover that 
sensation is not brutish but intelligent ; nay, is a pure 
mental act ; and this we shall particularly advert to in 
the chapter that follows. 

CHAPTER XLV. 

SENSATION AS KNOWLEDGE. 

In denouncing " Perception " in its modern sense 
we have revivified sensation, and thrown upon it all 
the weight of our knowledge of the universe. What is 
sensation ? It is the slender report of five bodily 
tissues. Consciousness reveals to us a smell, and a 



238 Ontology. [Book III. 

taste, an effusion of color, a sound, and a cutaneous 
feeling, and that, with a still more brutish sensibility 
of pain or appetite, is all our avenue to the world 
beyond us. 

But then superb things can be stated of each. 

1. First, these are not bodily phenomena at all. 
Whatever else we conclude, they are purely mental. 
And what I mean by this is, that the smell that comes 
from carrion is not material in any sense of conscious- 
ness. It may have a material origin. That is, it may 
take a dead carcass ever to send it to the mind. But 
this is a matter of discovery afterward. Genetically it 
may be as material as you please. But consciously, that 
is to say as a mental fact, the smell is pure intelligence ; 
and helps by its intelligence afterward to find out the 
matter and its outward state that helped to bring it to 
the mind. 

Nay, not even the nostril and its agency in it, nor 
the nerve which is the carrier of the actual sense, nor 
the brain which may be the seat of all of it, makes it 
the least material. The smell proper, as a thing looked 
at by itself, is a matter of mere consciousness. If I 
had not learned science, yet it would seem, as indeed 
it really is, a matter entirely within the mind. 

But if this is true of smell, then how of taste ? and 
how of color ? Sensation is a form of consciousness ; 
and as that idea is singularly complete, we must never 
forget it in all our unravellings of the mind. 

2. But if sensation be a form of consciousness, then 
all sensation is intelligent. Sensation is a macrocosm. 
It is endless like the universe. No two sensations are 
alike. And, what must be uttered with the most em- 
phatic eagerness, — no one sensation but has almost end- 
less capabilities of thought and reasoning. 



Chap. XLVL] Sensation and the Not-Self. 239 

For example, what I see ! Let me mention some 
of the things that I am conscious of in every vision. 

First, I am conscious of color. That color is 
red or blue. If red, it may be any of a thousand 
shades. Second, those shades have shapes. Those 
shapes are literally endless. Third, those endless 
shapes may vary in size and number. Again, number 
and size may be abstracted, and viewed apart. It is 
impossible to enumerate all the consciousnesses. But 
I may pile in touch and odor, and recollect that these 
are equally intelligent, and, without going further into 
the crowd, I reach this general reality : — that if sensa- 
tions are in harmony at all, there are enough of them, 
and they are enough significantly varied, and they are 
enough consciously intelligent, to build something up, 
whatever that something may intelligently appear. 

Let us state that under the two forms of Being. 

CHAPTER XLVI. 

SENSATION AS KNOWLEDGE OF THE NOT-SELF. 

SENSATION does very little, intelligent as it is, with- 
out the help of Recurrence. Stop any picture in the 
train. Stop a dozen of them. How very little in the 
current is absolute sensation. 

I look upon a house. Recurrence almost builds 
the whole of it. And what it does not build, or rather 
what it does not seem to put together, it colors with 
all the past. 

Let us think of that. 

My mere sense-consciousness is a superficies of light. 
That it does not lie lazily within, and stands out a dis- 
tant image of conception, is a tribute from the past. 
Understand me distinctly, I see simply what I see, but 



240 Ontology. [Book III. 

that conscious seeing is a mere surface, and (confining 
myself of course to sense) it contributes only that to 
my thought of Being. 

Let us have no mysteries therefore. Recurrence ; 
how shall we call it ? It certainly is not Sensation, 
and yet it plays the larger 'part in the game of knowl- 
edge. The reality is this : — Sensation and recurrent 
sensation, — they are the things to speak of. I cannot 
say they are the whole of knowledge. We will speak 
of that presently. I cannot say, Sensations when they 
recur are still sensations. They are not. They are 
quite different consciousnesses. I can only say, Sensa- 
tions and recurrent sensations are pure intelligences, 
and as such are largely concerned in my ideas of Being. 

Now what else is concerned in them ? 

We have seen that sensation is conscious of its 
likenesses. Recurrence is but a bringer up of things 
like. No two sensations are anything but like. If 
sensation is never the same, recurrence does not even 
seem the same. And we have explained the slow re- 
ceding of likeness till power and substance and God 
are slowly made to emerge, retaining scarce a patch of 
original likeness as means to recall my senses. 

We will return to this point. For the present we 
will assert the truth, that Sensation and recurrent Sen- 
sation, though not our whole thought of the Not-Self, 
are nevertheless the foundation consciousnesses. 

Whether there be more, we will state presently. 

CHAPTER XLVII. 

SENSATION AS KNOWLEDGE OF SELF. 

SELF without perception could of course never be 
discovered. No school is so bent on first truths as to 



Chap. XL VII.] Sensation as Knowledge of Self . 241 

affirm that a man could be conscious of self without 
ideas. There must be ideas coursing through his 
mind. And the second great fact we have already 
treated, viz. that he could never begin ideas without 
sensation. Sensation, therefore, must at least origi- 
nate before he could have any ideas of self. And yet 
sensation never could give any idea of self. We have 
established this sufficiently. A flash without order, a 
sense without continuance, could give no dual notion. 
And we must have in effect a twin notion, viz. the 
me and the not-me, as well as the perceiving conscious- 
ness, before we can assert intelligently either being. 
That brings in recurrence. Sensation and recurrent 
sensation, as in the instance of matter, must both be 
possessed, before we can build the idea of spirit. 

Keeping purely to these two however ; I mean by 
that, excluding any other imagined consciousness, — 
how entire a self can we build up ? Sensation as 
merely nervous, or (to revive the list) a sound, or a 
scent, or a light, or a taste, or a still coarser feeling, is 
all that starts thought ; and now a recurrent sense, or 
nerve-feelings brought shadowily back, these are the 
self-builders. They could build a very decent self if 
there were nothing direct besides. They could build 
it as they build matter, partly (that I may show respect 
to usage) out of consciousness itself, but partly as a 
metaphysic ens, outness and power and permanence 
and otherness and number being seen in recurrences 
themselves, and then analogy and difference being also 
seen, and taking the leap that carries us to metaphysic 
being. 

Yet if any one asks us, Is the self simply framed 
by these two ? Must sensation and the recurrent sen- 
sation be regarded as the sum of knowledge? Nay, 
11 



242 Ontology. [book III. 

adding the increment of what is like, or plying the 
empiricism of what is different, must sense and re- 
curred sense be all the base for projecting analogies 
toward the thought of being, we answer, No : but we 
postpone the secret for another chapter. We answer, 
No : as in the instance of matter. All being is percep- 
tion and its analogues. Perception, therefore, plays 
the heroic part. But then, what perception? Percep- 
tion must be all sensation; or perception rather must 
be sense or sense recurrences, or else there is a tertium 
quid that must be looked after as being directly con- 
scious. 

CHAPTER XLVIII. 

IS ALL PERCEPTION SENSATION? 

Perception might be separated from belief. I see 
the blue. That is sense perception. I see the like- 
ness of the blue. That is also direct. But I assert 
the equality of the blueness ; that is a belief. It looks 
ever so much equal. I cannot consciously assert it, 
but it passes into the other region of empirical uncer- 
tainty. So I hear a bell. I have heard it for a score 
of years. I have never known it to be silent. So, when 
the time comes, I perceive that it will ring again. But 
that perception is a spurious appellative. I do not 
really perceive. I perceive when there is a ringing 
now, but I perceive nothing of the future. That per- 
ceiving is really believing. It is an accommodated 
use, and means simply that I expect a ringing from 
analogies that have been experienced. 

So the ego. What is conscious of it I perceive. 
And if that is a fair vocabulary that makes the me and 
the not-me take-in a patch of consciousness, so that far 
and no farther I may be said to be conscious of self. 



Chap. XLVIIL] Is all Perception Sensation ? 243 

But if there be a metaphysic ens, which wears the red 
color or has the thought which marks the outward and 
the inward, that ens is like the ringing of the bell. It 
is bred of analogy. It is believed in, and not perceived. 
And it is believed in not from a Regulative Faculty, 
but as with the being of a God, because we are driven 
to it by analogy and difference. 

Perception, therefore, might be bounded consciously, 
and limited only to a metaphysical sense. And in this 
limit we do not say that we perceive the Deity, and 
we do not say that we perceive our spirits. We limit 
the vision to our consciousness. And there, as we 
have long ago explained, every atom of the thought is 
entered into and possessed as conscious. 

Now, is every atom of this thought, sensation ? Or, 
as that of course must be negatived, is every atom of 
that thought, sense or sense-recurrence ? 

We might come much nearer saying, Yes, than 
many would dream. What else is there beside these 
two? Number, — that is a sensation. Outness and 
inness and permanence and power, — those are all sen- 
sations. I mean literally what I say. These all may 
be dressed up by recurrence, but the base feature in 
each is imbedded in sensation. Recollect, each sense 
is all intelligence. That fact is not sufficiently remem- 
bered. Sensation of two ducks ! — fancy that, void of 
number ; or the blue sky without space ; or two bell- 
notes without duration. These are all discoveries of 
sense. And if you yearn back after something intel- 
lectual, why not ask it in hue or pitch or beauty? 
Sensation is either all of sense, or else it is none of it. 
Either it fails at the delicate colors of the sea, or else 
it takes in all it sees, or else it staggers at the universal 
fact that it shows to us ; and, therefore, time and space 



244 Ontology. [Book III. 

and permanence and outness and number are all a part 
of the actual facts of sense that come up by sensation 
and recurrence. 

Now are these two all of consciousness? 

Let us be very careful here. 

I think of other selves. They are bred of a free 
empiricism. They are analogues, therefore, and not a 
consciousness. I think of them as I do of the future 
bell-ringing of which I am never conscious, but in 
which I only believe. 

Nevertheless my mind is so constituted that I have 
certain emotions even when I do not conceive a thing 
but only believe. I do'not conceive another, but only 
believe him. That is, I do not perceive my neighbor, 
but only put him together. I perceive his color, and 
loose talk may make that a part of him, but otherwise 
he is not a consciousness. Of all things he is an em- 
pirical conceit, and yet with this fact about him to 
which I wish to draw particular regard, viz. that as I 
build up the analogue, — his sense from my sense, — 
his thought from my thought, — his power from my 
power, — his joy from my joy, — the emotion that his 
imagined happiness creates is totally different from that 
created by my own. A mere analogy of consciousnesses 
that builds up a neighbor spirit, evokes an entirely new 
consciousness, not an analogue, but a novelty, not a 
mere inferred thing, but an original ; that is, though 
the quiddity, my neighbor, is a mere inferred thing 
through an empiricism, my emotion thereanent is an 
original ; and a different pleasure is awakened by his 
happiness from that which is awakened by what is 
consciously my own. This will be understood under 
Pathics. It is not true, therefore, that all percep- 
tion is Sensation ; for not only are many perceptions 



Chap. XLVIIL] Is all Perception Sensation ? 245 

a recurrent sense ; but these Pathic ones are quite 
original. 

We could show the same in the realm of Taste. 

Indeed, as another thing ; — there are emotions 
which are upon emotions. 

Let me explain. 

I believe in others. I frame them as an empirical 
conceit. I do not squarely look at them, for they are 
matters of analogy. But I do squarely look at my 
emotion. They waken in me a species of perception, 
which, in the Pathic aspect, is absolutely new. This is 
a perfect consciousness, as much so as sense or memory. 
But then, this joy itself can in turn be looked at. It 
awakens another joy : this joy, in turn, is itself original. 
And now, multiply results. This joy is a matter of re- 
currence. Sense, therefore, and sense recurrences are 
not enough. The nobility of these moral joys is itself 
a consciousness. Perception, and the analogies of per- 
ception, are all we wot of; but perceptions are not all 
sensations. Perceptions are not all sensations and 
recurrences; but consciousnesses can spring out of 
conceits. That is to say, My neighbor, who is not a 
certainty, can breed in me consciousnesses that are, 
and that not mere belief-consciousnesses as of a future 
-bell, but first-hand emotions that can spring on no 
other ground. 



BOOK IV. 

PATHICS; 

OR, THE 

SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS EMOTION. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS. 
CHAPTER I. 

AN ATTEMPT TO INVENT ADEQUATE NAMES. 

THE Science of Perception as Emotion has no name 
such as we have laid our hands on in ail the other 
branches of our subject. To change an old name is 
awkward ; and old names are very likely to straggle back 
to old meanings. To invent a new name is bold, but is 
very certain to end happily, if the speculation does to 
which it is attached. If the speculation fails, of course 
all will, that is launched with it. If the task succeeds, 
the names' being quite new is all the better, as they 
will not shift through some older signification. 

The names we invent are Pathics, Eudemonics, and 
Agathology. 

Emotion is perception in the aspect of pleasure or 
pain. Pleasure or pain are not the only aspects of 
emotion. If they were, our course would be much 
simpler. Emotions are pleasures or pains, but emo- 
tions are very different. Emotions are sensuous or 



248 Pathics [Book IV. 

poetic or moral ; nay, just as different as perceptions ; — 
I mean by that, with precisely the same differences as 
the perceptions of which they are but aspects. But 
more than that, — as emotions they are not merely 
pleasurable. They may be right, or they may be 
heroic, or they may be tasteful, as we shall hereafter 
see. If not, Eudemonics is the only word we would 
have had to invent. But emotion has other aspects 
beside the eudemonic, viz. the ethical aspect, and also 
the aesthetical ; — ■ moreover, not necessarily cotermi- 
nous. Though they be all eudemonic ; that is, emo- 
tions always of either pleasure or pain, — they are not 
all ethical ; and they are not all aesthetical ; and, 
therefore, we need a wider term. And accordingly, 
we have chosen Pathics, as of the same form with 
Ethics, and as embracing all of them. Pathics is the 
Science of Perception as Emotion. We still retain 
Eudemonics, and use it for that branch of Pathics which 
treats of emotion as simply pleasurable or simply pain- 
ful. Then we have this division, — Pathics, including 
(1) Eudemonics, (2) ^Esthetics, and (3) Ethics. This 
is the whole of the subject. And we know no better 
way to bring out all the facts that it can be made to 
exhibit. 

And now, as coining is unpopular, let us finish that 
part of the business. 

Eudemonics would save us from another term if 
the good of emotion lay only in its pleasurableness ; 
but it does not. We delay the proof of this. All good 
lies in emotion ; but, strange to say, all not in its 
pleasurableness. Pathics is the whole field of good. 
Pathics has all divine good. Emotion is all the good 
of the universe. What a splendid department Pathics 
is ! Thought — what would that be worth, or wisdom, 



Introd. Ch. II.] under the Light of Psychology. 249 

or infinite power, or being, eternal in its years, but for 
emotion ? We need a term, therefore, — Agat/iology, as 
the Science of Good. It lies in Pathics ; but we give it 
no separate discussion. There is other good than 
pleasure ; but there is no other good than emotion. 
If there be good in being, and good in power, and good 
in wisdom, and good in the divine existence, it is all 
ancillary. The real good, whether in God or man, is 
that aspect of perception in which it goes by the name 
of emotion. 

CHAPTER II. 

PATHICS UNDER THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY. 

We learned, under the head of Psychology, that 
the Law of the Strongest Emotion was that which 
made pictures for us, or called out of sensation, or out 
of memory, that thought which would be most inter- 
esting to each particular mind. We should mistake 
this doctrine though, if we should imagine that per- 
ception happens to be emotional simply because un- 
emotional perceptions are not called out. The law of 
perception is simply the law of the strongest emotion ; 
and some emotion is inseparable from the very idea of 
perceiving at all. 

But Psychology would be still a mistake if its doctrine 
was, that perception had some emotion. The fact that 
.we found out was, that perception was emotion, for that 
emotion was but perception under another aspect ; and 
it will be remembered that we formulated Pathics (B. I. 
Chaps, X., XI.) by saying (1) that all perception was 
emotion, and (2) that all emotion was perception, so as 
to make the truth presented one of the most clear-put 
and comprehensive in all philosophy. 

(1.) That all perception is emotion, will appear best 
11* 



250 Pathics Book IV. 

from the very thought of the current. If the current 
is entire, and all our perception fills it ; — that is, if the 
current is all our consciousness, and there is nothing 
consciously in it but perception, — then emotion is not 
consciously in the current, or it is perception. But 
when we come to think, emotion is not only consciously 
in the current, but it is consciously in it all the time. 
This consciousness we can arrive at any moment. If 
we look within, the whole current is emotional, — nay, 
think of it for a single instant, the whole current is an 
emotion : and now not because it has sensitive sides, 
so to speak, or sensitive points ; for it is emotional 
throughout. The whole current of perception is per- 
ceptive in an emotional way. 

And not only so, but each part is. It is by these 
different views that we inspect our consciousness. Let 
us try the driest things. An angle ! I say I feel it, 
just as much as I see it. You may ask, Why do I not 
talk so then ? I do not say, I feel an angle ; first, 
because it would be ambiguous, feeling being an emble- 
matic word, and being derived from another sense. 
Moreover, I do not say, I feel an angle, because it does 
not suit me : I choose my words according to the per- 
ceptive or emotional aspect, just as I need them in my 
speech. But I say enough, in cases that admit the in- 
difference, to set forth all the reality. I say I see or 
I feel with a freedom absolutely total. I feel the truth 
or I see the truth, I feel His power or I see His power, 
I feel the reasonableness of an act or I see the reasona- 
bleness of an act; and I will let you dismember the sen- 
tence, and put one indifferently for the other. My 
appeal is simply to consciousness. If I stand at any 
hour of the day and fish in the current, and take the 
fish that first cometh up, perception and emotion are 



Introd.Ch.IL] under the Light of Psychology. 251 

perfectly commensurate. Perception is all emotional, 
and emotion is all perceptive. And I can see it best 
by just touching my thoughts. Try it as we read. 
Each one is not a hard concept, but a warm sense, 
pleasant or painful according to its nature. 

(2.) The other thought, All emotion is perception, 
is singularly fertile. It settles many a question. If 
taste have but emotion, men are ready to say, Why do 
we speak of reason as concerned in Taste ? Or, as a 
far weightier case, if conscience beget emotion, if holi- 
ness be only emotion, if the law be all that is right, and 
love be the fulfilling of the law, why is reason appealed 
to ? Conscience itself is supposed to be intelligent ; 
the truth an instrument upon it ; light necessary to it ; 
illumination the beginning of its reform ; and the Holy 
Ghost needed to enlighten it, as well as to wrap its 
frame with warmer feeling. 

All these things are explained when we remember 
that emotion is perception. When a man says, We 
must believe first, and feel afterward, we say, No : 
there is a Pathical unity. Nor is it so very hard to 
understand. Emotion is conscious. That much is as 
well settled as iron. Now if emotion is conscious, 
how much of it is conscious ? And if emotion attaches 
to perception, can it be conscious of all of itself, without 
being conscious of all the perception ? If I feel warmth, 
must I not have all the warm perception? If I love 
virtue, must I not know it ? or God, must I not know 
all that I love ? or sin, must I not enter into its 
delights? And by this I do not mean either as a 
prelude or a consequence, but must not love that goes 
feeling down to the very bottom of the emotion, feel 
all the perceptive facts, or have the love precisely as 
the same thing as the perceptive consciousness ? 



252 Pathics [Book IV. 

Emotion is not only perceptive in perceiving the 
perceptions that attend it, as for example, that it per- 
ceives the light before it feels it : on the contrary, 
emotion' perceives itself. It perceives the sight in its 
own emotional aspect. It can abstract its own emo- 
tionalness. Emotion is that functionary word that 
notes perception in its pleasurableness ; but as to its 
seeing less than perception, or being less than percep- 
tion, or being in essence different, that has been the 
mistake that has tangled ethical beliefs. I see beauty 
when I feel it, and right when I dote upon it, and God 
when I bow down and love Him. And if any one says, 
Why say feel, instead of see ? or why ever speak of 
feeling? why pile up words when one would answer 
even better? I say, One would not answer. Feeling 
and seeing are both needed, and present a different 
sense ; and there now we come to the point. If any 
one exclaims, How can seeing and how can feeling 
present the one reality of perception ? I say, How can 
blueness and how can brightness present the one reality 
of color? Here is the secret. A bright blueness and 
a blue brightness are identically the same. But if any 
one declares them philologically similar, we take issue 
at once. The brightness and the blueness are distin- 
guishably significant ; and yet they are numerically the 
same. And so perception and pleasure are distinguish- 
able, but only as aspects of a thought. The pleasure 
sees all that is to be perceived, and the perception feels 
all by which we are pleased ; and the phenomenal facts 
are open throughout all of either. 



Introd. Ch. III.] under the Light of Logic. 253 

CHAPTER III. 

PATHICS UNDER THE LIGHT OF LOGIC. 

If nothing is intuitively known but perception, 
emotion is perception or it is not intuitively known. 

This is the glory of Ethics. 

A way of speaking of it has been, that we reason 
out duties, and when chastity and truth and gratitude 
and self-love have been inspected by the reason, they 
are brought near to conscience, and become subjects 
of emotional regard. 

How superficial this is ! 

There are but two ethical emotions. Both these 
will be treated in the sequel. All duties are but 
instances of these. Out in life reason may have a 
play, I mean in its discursive acts, to judge whether 
this thing or that thing can be prompted by the two 
ethical emotions ; but this is all empirical. The whole 
conscience is intuitive. If any one asks, Is not Ethics 
reasonable ? I say, Doubly. Not only does it appeal 
to reason in its discursive acts, but to reason as the 
mind's intelligence. All conscience is reason. And 
now the explanation : — All conscience is a region of 
emotion : all right is in emotion : but then, as we 
have just explained, all emotion is perception. Con- 
science, therefore, both perceives and feels ; and hence 
the clearness of what many men blunder over, that 
conscience should both be an intelligence of the mind 
and a region of the heart, — the heart and the mind 
being in fact the same region of the' spirit. 

1. Hence the question, whether faith or repentance 
comes first, is ploughed under by this metaphysic. 
Both will come first. The conscience and the mind 
are not even twins, but one unitary spirit. 



254 Pathics [Book IV. 

2. Hence the nobility of the word conscience. It 
meant consciousness in all the earlier period of men. 
Even in the New Testament it is misinterpreted. 
When Paul said, " I have lived in all good conscience" 
(Acts xxiii. i) he meant consciousness. The word in 
the Greek had not lost its original meaning. " Curse 
not the king, no, not in thy conscience" (Ecclesias. x. 
20 marg) of course tells a similar history. " Their 
conscience also bearing witness" (Rom. ii. 15; see 
also ix. 1, Heb. x. 2). " The testimony of our con- 
science " (2 Cor. i. 12). We would not multiply 
instances. The grand fact is, that ethical truth is so 
under the eye of our consciousness that it at last monop- 
olized the word. Glory to God, that which we are to 
give account for at last is not, like our substantive 
selves, or like a substantive not-self whether divine or 
human, a matter of proof, but an intuitive conscience. 
The nobility of right is consciously witnessed under 
the very eye of the mind. 

3. Hence the strength of our polemic in defending 
Christianity. Holiness, — that we are conscious of: — 
and sin. The great facts of religion are matters of 
intuition. We are not emboldened enough by this 
reality. Protoplasm ; that is a mere empirical conceit. 
There may be much truth in it. The Unknowable ; 
we have too great a dread of it. Half of Spencer can 
be swept at once into the coffers of the Church. We 
have expounded God too much, and forgotten that 
most that we know of Him lies in the region of our 
conscience. When the Gibeonites come and pretend 
to be groping for the Almighty (Jos. ix. 3, 9), their 
" clouted shoes " and mouldy provisions, and their 
" old sacks upon their asses," ought not to deceive us, 
as though they had come a great way ; for they are 



Introd. Ch. iv.] under the Light of Ontology. 255 

neighbor sinners ; and, poor imbeciles like us all ! let us 
at least deal wilily if they come among us, and make 
them hewers of wood and drawers of water for the 
men of Israel. 

A vast deal may be gotten out of a working 
infidel. 

They scour the bottom of a filthy sailing vessel. 

Hume did it ; and so did Mill. 

And while our cause is the better for their rude attacks, 
it is never wrecked. Religion lies in the region of our 
consciousness. And while in teleological argument we 
have all the advantage of the infidel, we have a region 
into which he can never enter, — the testimony of con- 
science ; — and, therefore, ought to allow the widest 
liberty in the outer region of empirical results. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PATHICS UNDER THE LIGHT OF ONTOLOGY. 

THE very idea of God we have admitted as empiri- 
cal ; how, therefore, can we speak of consciousness in 
matters of religion ? 

Let us explain this. 

The very idea of self, so far as scientific men have 
pushed it out of the region of consciousness (see B. 
III. Chap. XXXVIL), is empirical also. Another man's 
self is just as empirical to me as the existence of the 
Almighty. 

It will appear when we come to Ethics, that moral 
emotion begins with our relations to other beings. Let 
us anticipate a little. We love others, and then we 
love the love that we thus begin with. Moral emotion 
could not begin except with the exercise of benevo- 



256 Path ics ■ [Book IV. 

lence. ' We will not particularize. The knowledge of 
right must begin with the knowledge of other beings. 

But now a strange anomaly ! My knowledge of 
other beings is empirical. My knowledge of the differ- 
ences of right is conscious. What is the solution ? I 
can never feel benevolence except in the thought of 
other beings. How then can it be possibly true that 
benevolence can be a consciousness, when the sole 
object of benevolence must be empirically discerned? 

Let us take analogies. 

Blue ; is not that intuitive ? and yet the very object 
that breeds it is quite empirical. 

Moreover, blue ; does not that awaken emotion? 
It is beautiful. Is the blue thing beautiful? Unques- 
tionably not — in the sense in which that question would 
be pertinent. And yet it awakens the emotion. All 
my reasonings about it are decidedly empirical. I do 
not know the not-me ; T do not know the me; I do 
not know the Almighty, — except empirically. And 
yet that which shines out through these empirical con- 
ceits, I mean beauty, and the emotion of right, are 
conscious intuitions, the latter so gloriously so as to 
have usurped towards it the name of conscience. 

■ Nay more, remember : — All things breed emotion. 
All perceptions are emotions. There are no such 
things as empirical conceits, or else they are emotions. 
All things breed different emotions. Just as the ideas 
differ, so do the different emotions. It seems that 
empirical ideas breed all the highest emotions. That 
is not wonderful. Empirical ideas are beyond us. 
They border the invisible. Blue sky we see. That is, 
we see its blueness. That breeds a low emotion. 
My neighbor I do not see. He is empirical. He 
breeds a high emotion. The great God is utterly be- 



Introd. Ch. IV.] under the Light of Ontology.. 257 

yond me. The only great emotion is built upon what 
is empirical ; and conscience, which is the power of that 
emotion, would lie utterly dead, unless empirical con- 
ceits rose by experience before my mind. 

Still the question remains, why is religion so com- 
fortable because it appeals to consciousness, when right, 
which is indeed an intuition, is predicated of emotional 
regards which are bent toward that which is empirical? 

Let us look at this. 

The being of my neighbor I am not conscious of. 
It is a dictate of experience. God I am not conscious 
of. He is a dictate of experience. Without such 
other beings I could know no morals. This will appear 
(see Ethics). Why am I so entrenched because virtue 
is a consciousness, when the very neighbor that makes 
it possible is only found out empirically before my 
mind? 

Empiricism, let it be observed, is a combination of 
myriad experfences. The heavier the combination, the 
stronger the empirical conceit. If Herbert Spencer's 
God and my God compare favorably in all other proofs, 
and I add moral ones which his does not possess, I 
gain the victory, for induction is of all facts, and if 
there be a world of consciousness which he does not 
take in, he fails that much. Mere benevolence ; I 
will not assert that that proves the existence of other 
beings that we may be benevolent to ; or mere love of 
right ; I will not say that that proves a great Embodi- 
ment of Right to whom we may worship and bow 
down. But this I do say, that if Darwin and I have 
equal teleological claims in all other respects ; and his 
protoplasm-brute and my Jehovah-God are equal, in 
foro rationis, in all physical respects ; and I take in the 
moral, and he cannot, but must leave it meaningless 



258 Pat hies [Book IV. 

and dead ; then I have beaten by his own organon. 
That is the best theory that takes in all the facts. And 
if he, beginning with the monad, has to leave out so 
conscious a fact as conscience, then he had better strain 
a little and bring in miracle, which is not so improba- 
ble a fact as that the Power that made me made me 
more and nobler than He. 

But once admitted — my God once suffered to come 
in, — then what follows ? Why, that the nobler fact of 
Him is- a matter of my consciousness. This it is that 
entrenches us so. If there were no God, facts of virtue 
would still survive. Men make their polemic rudely. 
Atheism is right, that right is right independent of the 
Deity. But when Theism is forced-in as necessary to 
explain the facts, how gloriously is it suffused with 
virtue ! How strong we become ! Our very highest 
consciousness puts the finishing stroke to our Theology. 
Blueness in the sky shows to us the not-self. Con- 
sciousness in the current shows to us the self; and 
soon aggregates to us in ten thousand ways notitias of 
other selves. Then our conscious virtues, not laying 
perhaps the base of the Deity, are ready to put in the 
key-stone. After that, the arch should not be shaken. 
The whole string of the curve is necessary. Every 
fact helps. But emotions are conscious facts ; and 
morals are the highest emotions. And, satisfied there, 
Christians should be less timid about the rest, and 
should leave more liberty in physics when the moral 
God is firmly and strongly in their hands. 

The moral God ; — what does that imply ? The 
moral God must be personal. The personal God must 
be intelligent ; and, if intelligent, then also emotional, 
and possessing will and happiness. Give me a moral 
God, and I ought to allow more liberty to the students 



Introd. Ch. IV.] under the Light of Ontology. 259 

of Ontology. And if you say, ' No : they may under- 
mine our arch : you yourself say that its foundations 
are empirical : virtue is conscious, but the God who is 
to possess it, is an empirical conceit : ' I say, Yes, but 
an empiricism so broad, so matted in its world of facts, 
so moulded in its ancient arguments, so attacked since 
the world began, and so defended under every argu- 
ment, that when I see it walled around by the very 
darts and javelins that it has broken, I think a shame 
to be so timid for it ; and, when we possess the citadel 
of conscience, let the empirical Copernicus, or the ad- 
venturous Galileo, take time to show what they can 
produce before our eyes. 



260 Eudemonics [b. IV. Pt. I. 



PART I. 

EUDEMONICS; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION 
AS AN EMOTION OF PLEASURE OR OF PAIN. 

CHAPTER I. 

EUDEMONICS IN ITS RELATION TO PATHICS. 

PATHICS is the science of perception as a pleasure 
or a pain. Eudemonics is the science of emotion in its 
pleasurableness or painfulness. Where is the differ- 
ence? All the emotion is a pleasure, and all the pleas- 
ure is an emotion. Where can Eudemonics find room 
to differ from Pathics, and, above all, in any discernible 
way to be embraced by it? The doctrines of Aga- 
thology, which we are next to consider, will begin the 
answer to this most radical question. 

CHAPTER II. 

EUDEMONICS IN ITS RELATION TO AGATHOLOGY. 

, EMOTION is the only possible good. Let one con- 
sider. If man had nothing but knowledge and power: 
or, to go at once to the Almighty, if God knew every- 
thing, and did everything, and lived forever, and 
reached immensity, but had no feeling, where would 
be the good of the universe? It is a very neat and 
very admirable question. A cosmos may be all rocks, 
or still nebular mist, or better yet never have been 
created, and be just as well as a universe without 
emotion. 

Now emotion is never anything else than a pleas- 



Chap, hi.] as Related to Ethics. 261 

ure or a pain. If a pleasure were no good except 
merely in its pleasurableness, then Eudemonics would 
cover the whole ground of Agathology. But pleasures 
are different. Some pleasures are merely pleasurable, 
like the taste of honey. Some pleasures are also taste- 
ful, like the sight of beauty. Some pleasures are 
heroical, like a glow of courage. And some, above all, 
are Ethical. Here is the great heart of Metaphysical 
Science. All are Eudemonic as far as they are pleas- 
urable. But some are ^Esthetic. Pleasures that are 
^Esthetic we shall find are good in other ways than as 
merely pleasurable. And when we come to the two 
Ethical emotions, we will find the highest conceivable 
good. These right emotions will some day be the 
highest pleasures ; but as a thing that is to take rank 
of that, they are pleasures excellent in themselves, or 
in other words emotions consciously conceived as having 
higher good than their simple pleasurableness, 

CHAPTER III. 

EUDEMONICS IN ITS RELATION TO ETHICS. 

Pleasure, — and now I mean in its sense as pleas- 
ant, — has one dignity, and that is that it is the starting 
point of all the possibilities of morals. Sensation we 
have seen must begin consciousness. And so benevo- 
lence, which requires for its province other people's 
pleasure, is the first occasion of all things ethical. 

1. Benevolence we shall find is not the highest 
virtue ; 

2. And pleasure we shall find is not virtuous sim- 
ply as pleasurable ; 

3. And self-love we shall find is a truism, and is 
fiercely misconceived when we call it virtue ; 



262 ^Esthetics. [B. IV. Pt. II. 

These are great facts of Eudemonics ; and they 
leave for Ethics th^s great reality, viz. that there is that 
in two simple pleasures (Ethics, D. II. Chap. VI.) which 
lifts them above everything in the universe besides, 
and that this quality is not their pleasurableness, but 
a conscious excellence, not accepted through an Intui- 
tive Belief (B. II. Chap. XVI), but actually seen in the 
heart's emotion. 



PART II. 



ESTHETICS; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION 
AS AN EMOTION OE TASTE. 

CHAPTER I. 

DEFINITION. 

Sir William Hamilton defines pleasure to be un- 
restrictedness of energy (Metaphysics, p. 577). Pain 
is obstruction of some energy. And to defend so 
bizarre a statement, he calls in Plato and Aristotle, 
and, to our amazement, those fathers of the human 
mind are guilty of such notions as this, — Plato, that 
pleasure is reaction from pain, and Aristotle, that it is 
a concomitant of energy. That is, I hang a flower 
before the eye of a child, and the pleasure of the child 
is a mere reaction from pain. So says Plato. Or I 
stick a pin into the flesh of a child, and his shriek of 
dismay is from mere impeded energy. Old monks get- 
ting hold of the manuscripts of these men could hardly 
make them seem more crazy by stuffing them with 



Chap. I.] Definition. 263 

dreams. And yet these were deliberate arguings ; and 
Sir William Hamilton, with his splendid gifts, lays 
claim to Aristotle, and argues at length for the " unim- 
peded " theory. 

Now, how are we to account for these things? 

If a house does not get down to the hard-pan for 
its base, it crazes and goes awry. 

The doctrine of perception is the hard-pan of 
Pathics. As long as emotion floats as something sep- 
arate, it is a Will-o'-the-Wisp. Men will make fools of 
themselves chasing it. But when it appears that emo- 
tion is but an aspect of perception, it is marvellously 
cleared. It does not need a definition. It cannot 
have one. * We cannot define blue color (except per- 
haps spectrally); and so we cannot define pleasure, 
except in discourses about it as in these chapters. 
Pleasure is an aspect of consciousness. Consciousness 
is a definition to itself. Pleasure is down at the very 
hard-pan ; and we cannot dig lower. And the jingle, 
Pleasure is pleasure, is a far better definition, and will 
be a better enlightenment even to a child, than all the 
mixed thoughts about energy, — empirical, and, there- 
fore, of no kinship to the whole class that is to be de- 
fined. 

So, eminently, certain definitions about taste. 

I hang a lily before a child, and it gives him 
pleasure. Long ago it has been noticed that this is not 
a pleasure like that which is given to him by its smell ; 
and yet it is a mere consciousness. The child, if 
idiotic, might clap its hands, and glare its eyes, at the lily. 

How foolish to give any definition other than one 
that merely bounds and separates. To attempt to give 
all of beauty, and to make it all up artificially and of 
extraneous things, is the wildest dream possible ; and 



264 Esthetics. [B. IV. Pt. II. 

yet precisely this has been done by Alison and other 
annotators. 

Beauty is an affair of consciousness. If you do not 
see it, I cannot show it to you. It is like warmth from 
fire, or light from torch, or scent from the breath of 
flowers. It is a consciousness in a mind's emotion.* 
And when Alison says, it is Association, and thus 
builds it bodily ; and when Plotinus says, it is Sym- 
pathy, — we always think of little seraphs, with wings, 
but with nothing to sit down on.f There is a differ- 
entia of beauty, and no doubt it will be difficult to 
fix, and there will be our labor. But we can start to 
build from the hard-pan. Beauty is an affair of con- 
sciousness. And by differentia we mean, that we can 
cut it daintily from all things else. But when we come 
to make it in the rough, we shall find, as in Alison's 
case, that it is an utter craziness. 

* We are speaking here of course, seminally. There are three 
meanings of the word, beauty. We are pestered by these dictionary 
differences. If anybody says, there are but two, we shall not stop to 
differ with him. If any one says, No ; only one, — we will have our 
agreements with him even there. The three we meant are, first, a con- 
sciousness ; second, a consciousness thrown like paint upon the object ; 
and, third, a power in the object, that is the empiric trait, by which the 
aesthetic consciousness is supposed to be aroused. Some may say, Not 
the first at all. The word beauty is always used objectwise. Some may 
say, Not the last at all. The conscious beauty is always felt to be 
suffused. We make little cavil. Abstractly, we triplify as we have 
done. Concretely, the three grow into a point. Self includes conscious- 
ness : and why should we wonder that the dry quality of reflecting 
beauty should keep itself suffused, first, with the objectwise charm, and 
second, with the charmed sense ; this last of course being the whole 
genetic reality 1 (see Ethics, Introd. Ch. IV.). 

f Of a like baselessness is " the old definition in the Roman school^ 
that beauty is 'multitude in unity,' " of which Coleridge says, that " no 
doubt such is the principle of beauty." 



Chap. II.] Differentia of Beauty. 265 



CHAPTER II. 



THE DIFFERENTIA OF BEAUTY. 



The differentia of beauty is hard to give, for three 
reasons. 

1. First, it is a term widely generalized. 
Perception is immense ; and no two perceptions 

are ever alike. Perception of sound, perception of 
scent, perception of power, perception of heat, percep- 
tion of time — there is no end of difference ; and the 
difference of taste is almost as various as the difference 
of perception. To crowd under one word all varied 
beauties — such as of sound, such as of light, of music, 
of poetry, of a woman's face, of a bridge's curvilineal 
outline, is to insure a difficult differentia. A logarithm 
is very far from a harp-note as having the one element 
of the beautiful. In Ethics it is not so. There there 
are but two emotions. At least that is what we shall 
propound. This gives amazing simpleness, and just 
where man needs it. But in beauty, a differentia would 
seem a myth, so varied are the forms of it, and so 
many. 

2. And further, secondly, there is so bad a general- 
ization. Smell ; has not that its beauties as well as 
color? The exquisite fragrance of the Jasmine, — is 
not that beautiful as well as flowers or birds ? To me 
it seems so. And when we get among tastes of the 
higher flavor, there is a delicacy among its daintiest 
feasts that to my consciousness at least is strictly beau- 
tiful. Of course this breeds delay. For if, in defining 
beauty, I find it break over the very bounds it has, 
there seems no end to the investigation. 

3. Thirdly, what we are to look for must be definite. 

12 



266 ^Esthetics [B. IV. Pt. II. 

Is beauty mere pleasurableness ? When I speak of 
delicacy, is it a mere quainter form of the pleasure? 
When I say, that to me the taste of a vanilla bean 
seems beautiful, do I merely describe a phase of the 
pleasure's pleasurableness? Here is a vital question. 
We insist on it for its light on Ethics : and we shall go 
forward for it to another chapter, viz. to Beauty as a 
Good. For here now is the vital question. Is a harp- 
note only beautiful as a higher dainty for my sense? 
or is it a good per se ? — rather is the emotion a good, 
apart from its good as merely pleasurable ? 

If this last can be affirmed, a fortiori will it give 
strength to Ethical positions. 



CHAPTER III. 

ESTHETICS UNDER THE LIGHT OF AGATHOLOGY. 

All good is of the nature of emotion. If all emo- 
tion is only pleasurable, then all good consists in being 
happy. This is the shirt of Nessus that has clung fast 
to the morals of the world. 

But now, very discriminatingly, All emotion is a 
pleasure. That is beyond a doubt. Moreover all the 
emotion is a pleasure, and it is nothing else (unless it 
be a pain). And yet all the emotion is a perception. 
We say this to show that things may be numerically 
the same, and yet have very different aspects. Pleasure 
may be the whole emotion, and yet may have different 
aspects. 

The question arises whether pleasure has but one 
aspect, viz. its being pleasurable, or whether it has 
other aspects, these other aspects being other goods 
beside its mere pleasurableness. 

If pleasure has but one aspect, viz. its pleasurable- 



Chap. IIIJ under the Light of Agathology. 267 

ness, this book of ours could be shut up like a tele- 
scope. Eudemonics could take the whole place instead 
of Pathics, and Agathology would only include Eude- 
monics, pleasure being the only good and the single 
pivot for revolving histories. 

But, now, pleasure is not the only good. The emo- 
tion otherwise may have a conscious excellence. The 
splendors of art, — a man may actually worship them. 
He may say, I actually dote upon these pictures. If we 
ask him, Do they give you pleasure ? He may say, 
Yes. If we ask him, Do they give you more pleasure 
than your food and banquetings ? They may or may 
not. After a moment's hesitation he may refuse to 
say. But this he will say, that they give him a better 
sort of pleasure. And the more we investigate, the 
more we will come to the conclusions, that men see 
good in emotions besides their pleasurableness. And 
this not for their hygiene, and not for their pomps, 
and not for their results, and not for their reputes, but 
purely. There is a conscious good in taste above and 
beyond its being simply pleasurable. 

And among plainer people, why do we say that 
cleanliness is next to godliness ? Is it that it is healthy? 
Is it that by a roundabout reasoning we have found 
out that purity of body is favorable to purity of 
mind? And even then, why is it favorable? If a 
man were to confess, A good plum-pudding would give 
me more pleasure than a clean room, but yet the clean 
room would give me the higher form of pleasure, would 
we think him crazy ? or would we think that he was 
conscious of a good in certain emotions of pleasure 
other than their mere pleasurableness before his 
mind? 

We have hints of the truth here by what comes float- 



268 Aesthetics. [B.JV. Pt.il 

ing in our speech. Like when we come near to England 
the sea-weed begins to float, so, in this neighborhood 
of Ethics, the word ought begins to color our vocabu- 
lary. If a man says that for his part he likes roast 
beef; he does not care for pictures, — a man would not 
be thought senseless who should tell him, he ought to 
care for pictures. And when we float into the region 
of Heroics, a man ought to be brave even outside of a 
question of morals. We ought to be cleanly. A man 
ought to enjoy Niagara. And if it give him more pleas- 
ure to eat his dinner than to go to see it, he ought to 
see it, for the mere superiority of the taste, beyond its 
measured pleasurableness. 

And men act upon this — miscreants who have no 
morality. Servetus will die at the stake. The devil 
will storm heaven if it sinks him leagues deeper into 
misery. All men smart for their heroics. And it is 
not a question of right, nor a question at all of happi- 
ness, nor a question of ultimate results, but a present 
heroism. All men will bend to their taste in sacrifice 
of that which has superior pleasurableness. 



Introd. Ch. I.] Emotion at Emotion. 269 



PART III. 

ETHICS; OR, THE SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS AN 
EMOTION OF CONSCIENCE. 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS. 

CHAPTER I. 

EMOTION AT EMOTION. 

CONSCIOUSNESS is the perception of our perception, 
or the awareness that each perception has of all of its 
own perceiving. Emotion is also perception, and is 
also self-conscious ; and it can abstract. And emotion 
itself being an aspect of perception, it can abstract that 
aspect ; that is, emotion can be conscious of itself in 
the mere aspect of being a perceptive pleasure. Now, 
in the instance of ^Esthetics, there is a duplicity in this 
abstraction : that is, I can feel a pleasurableness in a 
pleasure, and I can feel a dignity apart from what is 
merely eudemonic. A blue sky, for example ; it is 
not only a delight, but it is beautiful. It is a delight 
because it is beautiful ; but it is beautiful more and 
better than simply as being a delight. This is not an 
Intuitive Belief; it is directly a consciousness. I see 
a thing blue. I see a thing round or square. That is 
not an Intuitive Belief. So I see a thing beautiful. 
The emotion of beauty is just as conscious as the emo- 
tion of warmth. I cannot define it, except as beauty 
is the chosen name for the power that a sky has to 



270 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. in. 

look beautiful, or to give that species of pleasure which 
is not a good simply for its pleasurableness. 

So now of conscience. There is something still 
rarer. Emotions of taste abstract and separate their 
own especial dignity. But emotions of conscience do 
more than this. There are emotions at emotions. 
Let me define carefully. All emotions breed emotions. 
That is, all emotions are self-conscious, and all self- 
conscious things, when we turn to look at them, are 
again emotional, simply on the ground that all percep- 
tion is itself emotion. 

When I think of the sky, therefore, the emotion of 
beauty that it excites I can think of afterward ; and 
when I think of it afterward, it is again emotional, that 
is, the emotion of beauty, when it recurs, is beautiful 
again before my mind. 

But Ethics goes a story higher. A first sight 
actually bequeaths a second sight, and that nobler and 
most discrepant. I see a beautiful cloud, and that is 
the end of the reality. But I see my friend's prosper- 
ity, and I rejoice in it, and that is a pleasure, like the 
pleasure for the blue cloud, dignified beyond its mere 
pleasurableness. But I think of this pleasure, and 
there is now a new pleasure again ; but not as in the 
instance of beauty a mere reduplication of the other, 
but quite a different one, not like the second rainbow 
fainter than the first, but more dignified and more im- 
perative. In other words there emerge two excellences, 
one an excellence of my pleasure in the prosperity of 
my friend, and the other in my pleasure at that excel- 
lence, the germs as we shall hereafter see of our two 
sole virtues, one my virtue at being pleased for my 
friend, and the other the vastly higher one of being 
pleased for that pleasure, that is to say, the dignified 



Introd. Ch. hi.] Emotion as it Leads to Action. 271 

emotion of being pleased at a pleasure simply for its 
excellence. 

CHAPTER II. 

EMOTION AS IT WIDENS ITS VOCABULARY. 

Love is mere pleasure with a new name to make 
it fit better in the uses of our literature. So with a 
host of other words that confuse from not being kept 
unitary. I love a tune, simply as meaning that I see 
its beauty. I love to think, I love to pray, I love my 
neighbor, I love my Maker, partly let me here say as 
meaning a habit, viz. the fact that I could love if the 
occasion offered ; but,, as a conscious exercise at the 
time, it simply means pleasure ; viz., thought pleases 
me, and prayer pleases me, and my neighbor pleases 
me when he continues prosperous, and God pleases 
me ; that is, perception is emotion, and the perception 
of these things is emotional pleasantly before my mind. 

So of desire. Digging down to its root in pleasure 
and in the opposite pain is mere dictionary work. 

And so of will. These are all moral terms ; but 
how they are bred of emotion has already appeared. 
There is nothing moral but emotion, and there is no 
emotion that is moral but two, as will hereafter appear; 
and will, as has already been seen, is a highly artificial 
vocable, bedded in emotion, with two narrow offices 
to meet, one in the play of the muscles, and the other 
in the mere phenomenon of detained perception. 

CHAPTER III. 

EMOTION AS IT LEADS TO ACTION. 

As Not-I can only be known through the five senses, 
so / can only act through my bare volition. If volition 



272 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. 

is that narrow thing (B. I. Chap. XXX.), moving my 
muscles, and fixing my attention, it is easier to trace 
to pleasure or the want of it all my personal responsi- 
bility. Will is a pleasure pained and straitened if it 
does not reach certain expectations. Killing a man, 
therefore, is not wicked till we have cut down past all 
the vile accessories. The knife ; and, just as much, 
the arm ; and, of the arm, the muscle ; and, down the 
arm, the nerve ; and, through the nerve, the brain ; 
and, in the brain, the motions, whatever they chance 
to be, — these are all innocent. The whole guilt is in 
the pleasure, that is, the pleased emotion which begot 
the force which swept mysteriously down to the ner- 
vous agency. 

We shall see hereafter what sin is. It is negative. 
It is a want of two emotions. If action is called sin, it 
is by accommodation. If positives are called sin, like 
loving wine, or like loving gain, it is as a sign or a sin- 
bearer. There is nothing primarily sinful but a want. 
And as the muscles of the neck pull it all awry when 
those are dead on the side opposite, so sin is really sin 
in its positive lusts, because they are not restrained 
and balanced in an opposite affection. 



CHAPTER IV. 

EQUIVOCALS. 

If any one will try the phrase upon his lips, — 
' Beauty is an emotion,' he will find that it does not 
agree with general usage. If he will try it, however, 
in his consciousness, he will find that it might be the 
usage, for that beauty is an emotion turned objectwise ; 
for that the joy is a consciousness ; and that out of the 
habit of empirical reference it is painted on the object ; 



Introd. Ch. IV.] Equivocals. 273 

just as color is a pure consciousness, but, out of the 
same habit, we paint it on the sky ; and paint it at a 
distance, though distance all now agree is an empirical 
conceit, found out, beyond all manner of question, 
after empirical delays. Now, beauty is also equivocal ; 
for it may be put for that weird power which the sky 
has to produce the consciousness, or to give the inex- 
plainable idea of beauty. 

Precisely so virtuousness can be discoursed about. 
If we try the phrase, ' Virtuousness is a consciousness,' 
we will find it is not usage. But if we try the thought, 
Virtuousness is a consciousness, for we have no man- 
ner of thought of it but as it is revealed as an aspect 
of an emotion, — we find ourselves stating all the cog- 
nizable truth. Beauty is painted outwardly : but yet 
it is an emotion inwardly. Color is painted outwardly ; 
and yet it is a bare sensation. Virtuousness is affirmed 
of the emotion ; and yet what constitutes it, and makes 
it cognizable, is the emotion itself; just as the sensa- 
tion is the color. The only confusion is, that we don't 
speak that way. We take an aspect of consciousness ; 
in the instance of sight, all the aspect, viz, color, and 
color it upon the sky itself; and so when the sight is 
beautiful, we turn that objectwise also ; though the 
beauty is all in the sight. And so, virtuousness, though 
really a consciousness, is turned objectwise also ; though 
nothing can be more purely emotional than that tang 
of taste that belongs to the delights of conscience. 

Where do we stand, therefore ? 

What is emotional is of the essence of virtuous- 
ness ; just as what is sensational is of the essence of 
blue color. Nevertheless, as dictionary talk, the vir- 
tuousness is painted as a quality, just as blueness is 
painted on the sky. And now, to add also the equivoque, 



274 Ethics. [B. iv. Pt. III. 

the word is made to apply to a drier quality, that is to 
say that trait that starts the emotion, just as color occa- 
sionally goes to that fancied power that projects the 
blue light upon the mind. 

We can i?nagine virtuousness, therefore, with three 
meanings ; — first, as a conscious emotion, just as beauty 
might be called a conscious emotion, if language worked 
that way; second, as a consciousness in the emotion 
looked at objectwise, just as beauty is all of conscious- 
ness, but painted outwardly on the sky ; and third, a 
dry quality. This last is a mere empirical conceit ; and 
is the made-up thought of something to produce the 
consciousness, or to warrant the emotion bred inwardly 
in the mind.* 

Now, carefully hide these three distinct meanings. 
We wish to bring in for immediate use three totally 
distinct from them. 

Let us take the word virtue. This word babbles 
like a brook. But, out of its dozen meanings, let us 
take centrally three. It means, first, the virtuousness 
which we have just dissected. This is the prolific 
meaning. We speak, for example, of the virtue of a 
certain emotion. It means, second, the virtuous emo- 
tion itself. It means, thirdly, the character that has 
the habit of such emotions.f Please divide our Ethics 

* I need not say that this last requires Abstraction carefully to sepa- 
rate it. Practically, it mixes with the others, just as self takes-in the 
present consciousness. When I say, ( The coloring on that fence,' — it 
is very hard to keep out the conscious blue, and to think only of the 
chemical trait by which that projection can be made upon the eye. 

f Here we must erect again the same guard. Self includes con- 
sciousness. The not-self -includes the instant color. Men cannot keep 
such things separate. And hence these ethical meanings get mixed. 
The (i) quality of the emotion sinks into the (2) emotion ; for there is 
nothing numerically but the emotion. And, again ; the (3) character of 



Introd. Ch. IV.] Equivocals. 275 

with these three ; first, Virtue, or the Moral Quality ; 
second, Virtues, or Moral Duties ; and third, Virtue, 
or Moral Character. These will be the headings of 
our three principal Divisions ; and, springing, as they 
all do, out of the first, they will keep in view our main 
idea ; that it is on the Quality of Virtuousness that 
the whole Science is made to depend. 



Here we mean to print a manuscript of twenty 
years' standing. We print it unchanged. We alter no 
word up to page 339 where it ends. 

We wrote it as Ethics long before other metaphy- 
sical investigations. We were enamored of its analy- 
tical truth. We are so still. We have pursued all 
subsequent search that we might confirm or explode 
it. We have not been able to explode it. We have 
drifted in some of the detail, but in the direction of 
plus rather than of minus. Where we need it we 
will supply a foot note."* But we will retain all the 
text ; first, because we could but little change it ; and 
second, to show that we have not changed : that here 
has been a system, conceived in an earlier period, held 
steady for twenty years ; that here has been a system 
that other metaphysical study has not modified ; that 
here has been a system in the very centre of the interests 
of men, not bent to other systems, but itself enthroned 
first, and finding through a quarter of a century mere 
mental facts wonderfully assimilated to its understood 
moralities. 

the man seems nothing but the (1) character of his act, from the reason 
above given, that self includes our present consciousness. These things 
are different, however ; and can be kept apart by a discreet abstraction. 
* Marked (1875), to distinguish it from old foot-notes.,. 



276 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. I. 

DIVISION I. 

THE MORAL QUALITY. 

CHAPTER I. 

OF MORAL SCIENCE. 

MORAL Science treats of that quality of certain 
conscious exercises which we call moral. Conscience 
is the mind in its power to discern this quality. Duties 
are those exercises of mind which possess this quality. 
Obligation is that aspect of this quality in which those 
exercises that possess it become our duty. Law is 
that formulary, written or unwritten, expressed or 
implied, in which those exercises that possess this 
quality are commanded. Moral Science, therefore, 
turns in no direction, and uses no language, in which 
this quality in its various connections and relations is 
not its sole subject. Moral Science, therefore, has 
this element of simplicity, that its subject is one idea. 

CHAPTER II. 

OF THE MORAL QUALITY. 

BUT the moral quality as the subject of Moral 
Science is not only one idea, but, what is more impor- 
tant, it is a simple idea. You can perceive it but can- 
not define it.* It is like beauty. Beauty is a simple 

* This is all sufficiently true, though written obviously under the 
conception of simple ideas technically so called. There are no such 
simple ideas (see B. I. Chap. XV). Ideas are more or less simple. No 



Chap. III.] Of What Things are Moral. 277 

idea. You can perceive it, but cannot define it. And 
^Esthetics, which is the science of beauty, would be a 
fine illustration of Ethics or Moral Science, which is 
the science of the quality we are considering, if beauty 
were not so varied. It is, in fact, a congeries of simple 
ideas. For the beauty of a poem, and the beauty of a 
sunset, and the beauty of a chorus, and the beauty of 
a logarithm, are certainly not all one object of thought ; 
nay, they are not all one simple idea. But the quality 
we are considering has no variety except it be in its 
negative or opposite. For except we make a second 
simple idea of sin, the moral quality all over the world 
is single : it admits of no definition ; and Moral Science 
would have nothing to show for itself in the way of an 
analysis, if it depended upon resolving that most unique 
and indivisible idea or quality into anything like dis- 
tinct or essentially different appearances or natures. 

CHAPTER III. 

OF WHAT THINGS ARE MORAL. 

BUT though we cannot define the moral quality, 
yet we can tell what things are moral. This is a very 
different question. I cannot define beauty ; but I can 
tell what things are beautiful. And it will be observed 
that a quality and the thing by which ife is possessed 
can be looked at as different ideas. I cannot define 
color ; but I can say what things are red and purple. 
And if it should be found that the moral quality 
belongs to a very few of the objects of our conscious- 
absolute definition is possible. The simpler the idea, the less possible 
its definition. But no idea, however complex, is capable of precise 
definition ; but only can have suggested its closest analogies in our 
consciousness (1875). 



278 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. I. 

ness, and these few can be put into a catalogue, the 
doing so would be a beautiful analysis. For, once 
having settled that the quality is an indefinable idea, 
and that the things by which it is possessed can be 
all marked down and numbered, and the science is 
complete. No practical detail can afterward give us 
serious anxiety. 

CHAPTER IV. 

WHAT THE MORAL QUALITY SHALL BE CALLED. 

We might be satisfied with this very expression, — 
the Moral Quality; and indeed there would be some 
serious advantages gained ; for it would oblige us 
always to consider that it is a mere quality, and noth- 
ing else. But then sin is a moral quality, as well as 
its opposite. It is important to keep these simple 
ideas more separable. 

We had thought of right ; that Moral Science 
was that branch of human philosophy that was con- 
cerned in right ; that right was a simple idea ; that 
being on that account incapable of being defined, we 
could only ask, What things are right ? and so go on 
in our path of investigation. This would be very sim- 
ple. But then, unfortunately, right means not wrong, 
as well as that which is positively virtuous. 

And so holiness, and righteousness, and many other 
ethical expressions. Holiness, for example, is the moral 
quality ; and that in no other than its absolute idea ; 
there could be no other ; but then, the moral quality 
in a certain restricted application. Holiness, more- 
over, is applied to character ; and, moreover, it is ap- 
plied to conduct; so that it is endlessly ambiguous. 

We have determined, all things considered, to go 



Chap. IV.] Name for the Moral Quality. 279 

back to an old word, and call the moral quality 
Virtue. 

Our objections to this are that virtue is really a 
name for eight or nine different ideas. We need not 
mention all of them. Some of them will never be con- 
founded with any philosophical expression. We shall 
mention three of them. And these are so constantly 
important that we must keep them in our view. One 
is the moral quality ; as for example where we say, 
The virtue of certain exercised affections. The second 
is the things that are moral ; in which case the word 
is used in the plural, meaning those virtues or exer- 
cised affections themselves. Thirdly, it is applied to 
character. These uses are really the divisions of our 
subject as we intend to consider it. And we might have 
employed the word in the titles of our different books, 
and called them, 

I. Virtue, or the moral quality; 
II. Virtues, or the moral duties ; and 
III. Virtue, or moral character. 

This distinct discrimination will at least keep us 
from being confused by the word itself. For let us 
remember that virtue means, either rightness, or the 
things that are right, or the character in which these 
right things are found. 

They are, in fact, altogether different ideas. 



28o Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 



DIVISION II. 

THE MORAL DUTIES. 

CHAPTER I. 

OF WHAT THINGS ARE MORAL. 

THERE are but two things that have virtue, or that 
possess the moral quality, and that become on that 
account virtues* or Moral Duties; and besides these 
there are no virtues in the universe. One of these 
is Benevolence, or a love of the welfare of other 
beings ; and the other is a love of the Moral Quality 
itself. 

We do not mean that all other virtues are implied 
in these, or that if these are observed all other duties 
are equally brought to pass, but that all moral duties 
are these, and that virtue is not a quality of anything 
beside, any more than taste or fragrance is a quality 
of anything else than matter. 

CHAPTER II. 

OF BENEVOLENCE. 

FOR one of these in which the moral quality is 
found we have a word which, for one derived from 
popular language, is remarkably philosophical. Love 
of others is a far more ambiguous expression. Love 
to others may arise from esteem as well as from Benev- 

* The reader will mark the different uses of the word. 



Chap, ill.] Benevolence, a Virtue. 281 

olence. Indeed, the love that arises from esteem, is 
much more properly expressed by the word, than the 
love which arises from Benevolence. The love by 
which we pray for them that despitefully use us and 
persecute us, is only a love for their welfare.* And I 
am no more bound to love those that are not lovable 
or worthy of my affection, than I am bound to love a 
spider or poisonous capello which nevertheless I am 
bound to regard and treat with a suitable compassion. 
Benevolence, therefore, is a universal principle. 
"Do not I hate them that hate thee?" says the 
Psalmist ; and yet we are commanded to " bless them 
that curse us." It is rare that in popular language a 
word is found so perfect in its meaning as this word 
Benevolence for the simple affection of wishing well to 
all others than ourselves. 



CHAPTER III. 

WHETHER BENEVOLENCE IS A VIRTUE. 

No man, perhaps, ever denied that Benevolence in 
any case had the moral quality ; but there are men so 
inconsistent as to declare, that Benevolence is not 
moral unless it is indulged in from a sense of obligation. 
If they denied that benevolence had a moral quality 
in any case, it would be impossible to answer them ; 
for, except by appeal to Scripture, which commands us 
to love even our enemies, whether benevolence be a 
virtue or no, is an affair of consciousness. If a man 
cannot feel that benevolent affection is moral, it cannot 
be proved to him. 

To those, however, that imagine that benevolence 

* {Bane-void) benevolence. 



232 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

becomes moral only when we conceive that it is right, 
there are three considerations to be presented, (i.) If 
a thing is not moral until we feel it to be so, then it is 
not moral at all; for how can we feel a thing to be 
moral, if it be not moral in itself? (2.) Again, if a 
thing is not moral until we feel it to be so, then we 
must make our election between the two ideas that are 
here stated. Here is the feeling of benevolence, and 
the feeling of duty. The two are not even coincident. 
We must first have a feeling of benevolence ; and then 
a regard for it as our obligation. Wherein is the moral 
quality contained? If in the feeling of benevolence, 
that is the very thing for which we are contending. If 
in the sense of obligation, that is altogether a different 
idea. (3.) Then a practical difficulty; — If the thing be 
not moral until we feel it to be so, then a man who is 
so engrossingly benevolent that he does not stay to 
consider its obligation, may be more of a benevolent 
man but less of a moral one. In other words, his love 
is not moral at all unless he delays it long enough to 
think of its obligation. 

These things are not all very consistent. 

Benevolence is either a virtue or not. If it be not 
a virtue, then its opposite is not a vice, and I may be 
as hard-hearted as I please, without any dereliction of 
moral obligation. If it be a virtue, then it is possessed 
of the virtuous quality itself, for if we attempt to trace 
it and say, Benevolence is our duty because God has 
commanded it, the question returns, Why God has 
commanded it, and the answer, Because it is our duty. 
And if it be said, It promotes the general welfare, it 
may be asked, And why am I bound to promote the 
general welfare ? and then it may be answered, Because 
it' is benevolent. 



Chap. IV.] Is Benevolence the only Virtue ? 283 

Benevolence, therefore, is a simple and original 
virtue. 



CHAPTER IV. 

IS BENEVOLENCE THE ONLY VIRTUE? 

But if it be asked, Is Benevolence the only virtue ? 
I answer, No ; and I prove it merely by finding an- 
other. That, after all, is the simplest argumentation. 
If the question arises, Are there only four senses ? 
any arguments I might build up on the evil of having 
only four, would be far less potent than the proof that 
there are five. 

Now I might stay to show the inconsistency of a cer- 
tain mode of stating a certain doctrine, — That all vir- 
tue consists i?i benevolence. I might show that virtue is 
a quality, and benevolence the thing in which it in- 
heres ; and that unless virtue is used in a very narrow 
and uncommon sense, it would be just as awkward to 
say that all virtue consists in benevolence, as that all 
beauty consists in singing, or that all power consists in 
a steam engine. Virtue and benevolence are entirely 
different ideas. Or, returning to what is evidently im- 
plied, I might deny that benevolence is the only vir- 
tue,* because God has far higher aims, and man far 
higher obligations, than the happiness of others. And 
we might produce the consequences of holding that be- 
nevolence is the only thing that is possessed of a moral 
quality. 

But a far simpler way is just to show that there is 
some other virtuous affection ; and that that affection 
is primordial like benevolence itself, and cannot be con- 
founded with it, but is a different idea ; that benevo- 

* In the second sense of that term ; see Ethics, D. I. Chap. IV. (1875.) 



284 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

lence and that other affection are reduced to an ulti- 
mate analysis, and are both separate possessors of the 
idea or quality of virtue. 



CHAPTER V. 

OF A LOVE TO THE MORAL QUALITY ITSELF. 

Now to find out what that other affection is, let us 
imagine a great instance of benevolence exhibited. Let 
us suppose a horse dashing along the public street, and 
some person periling his life to save a child that is 
playing upon the pavement. Suppose this to be an 
instance of pure benevolence. Suppose another man 
standing at his door, and the tears of a generous ad- 
miration starting to his eyes on seeing the benevolent 
act. Suppose this to be an instance of pure admira- 
tion of benevolence. Here then are two things, be- 
nevolence and admiration of benevolence, things un- 
questionably different, but both with the appearance 
of virtue ; and, at first sight, these two might be imag- 
ined as at least worthy of being looked at as to whether 
they are not the only possible virtues. 

Presently, however, a third person is seen eagerly 
watching the second. A love of benevolence has 
become in its turn an object of admiration, like benev- 
olence itself. And so, a fourth person might express 
his approval of the third ; and a fifth, of the fourth ; 
and a sixth, of the fifth ; and a seventh, of the sixth ; 
and so on indefinitely; benevolence, and the love of 
benevolence, and the love of the love of benevolence, 
and so on, burdening our catalogue, until it might be 
thought to be impossible to have any more convenient 
statement. 

And yet immediately we are reminded of the fact, 



Chap, v.] Of Love to the Moral Quality. 285 

that what each man loves in his neighbor is the moral 
quality. The first man saves the child out of a 
simple feeling of benevolence. The second man loves 
the first out of a regard to that moral quality of which 
the act of his benevolence is possessed. And so on in 
the other cases. It is the moral quality in each. And 
if I say, Benevolence and a Love of the Moral 
Quality, I shall have described all the feelings of the 
case. The first man loves the child from benevolence. 
The second man loves the first because he loves the 
moral quality of his benevolent self-sacrifice. The 
third man loves the second because he admires the 
moral quality of the admiration which the second feels 
for the first. And the fourth man loves the third 
because he admires the moral quality of this pre- 
vious admiration. And so on indefinitely. There is 
no difficulty in the further statement. Benevolence 
and the love of the moral quality are therefore all 
that appear in this whole concatenation of experi- 
ences. 

Now, that this second is a virtue I need hardly stop 
to demonstrate : or that it should be the only virtue I 
need hardly stop to prove impossible. It is entirely 
distinct from benevolence. The two are reduced to 
their last analysis. And if any man imagines that 
what have been reduced to two, might, on a closer 
inspection, result in unity, he must remember that 
the two are simple ideas ; that they are incapable of 
any further simplicity of sense ; benevolence and ad- 
miration for the virtuous quality being emotions of 
the soul which can only be felt, and which cannot be 
conceived by any description of their meaning. * 

* There have been two general theories of morals ; one, that all 
virtue consists in benevolence ; the other, that all virtue consists in a 



286 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

CHAPTER VI. 

PROOF THAT THERE ARE BUT TWO VIRTUES. 

BENEVOLENCE and a love of the moral quality can 
be proved to be the only virtues in the same way that 
five of our physical gifts can be proved to be our only 
senses. No man would attempt to decide it by look- 
ing at any of the five, but at a sixth or seventh that 
might claim to belong to the catalogue. We mean to 
pass in review several of our common affections, namely, 
Love to God, Love to Self, Gratitude, and Natural 
Affection ; and having exhausted the possibilities in 
the case, appeal finally to Scripture, which declares that 
there are but two virtues. 

CHAPTER VII. 

OF LOVE TO GOD. 

God, though the most simple of all existences, is 
the most compound of all ideas. We put together all 
that is excellent in ourselves ; and, making it infinite, 
attach it to the Supreme Being; and that is every idea 
of Him. A love of the Supreme Being is, therefore, a 

love of right on its own account. The argument against the first has 
been, that then God has no real hatred of sin, and only opposes 'it be- 
cause of its effects. The argument against the second has been, * that 
then there is no such thing as right ; for that if ail virtue consists in the 
love of right on its own account, where do we get the first right to love? 
The theory we are introducing provides for both these difficulties. 
Benevolence is ' the first right we get to love ' ; and then love to right 
itself is the second right thing ; benevolence playing the same role in 
Ethics that Locke said sensation did in Logic ; starting us, so to speak, 
in our conceptions, or giving us the possibilities of thought in the case. 

* Or, may be (1875.) 



Chap. IX.] Why Self-Love has been thought a Virtue. 287 

love of wisdom and power and justice and goodness 
and truth ; and, so far as it is a moral feeling, it is a 
love of His moral character. For, except so far as it 
is gratitude, of which we shall afterwards speak, or 
benevolence, if any one chooses to assert that we are 
benevolent to the Almighty, it is a love of His moral 
attributes, and, therefore, nothing more than a love 
of the moral quality as it is embodied in the holiness 
of God. 

In either case, therefore, benevolence and a love of 
the moral quality cover all the experiences in its 
history. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

OF LOVE TO SELF. 

Self-Love is neither a virtue nor a vice. It is 
constitutional. If we are made capable of happiness, 
being happy, which is very little removed from delight- 
ing or loving to be so, is as innocent as existence itself. 
Desiring to be what we are constituted happy in being 
is neither right nor wrong. The opposite of it is as 
inherently impossible as grieving when we are not sad, 
or joying when we are not happy. Self-Love, there- 
fore, is not a virtue. 

CHAPTER IX. 

WHY SELF-LOVE HAS BEEN THOUGHT A VIRTUE. 

PRUDENCE was one of the four cardinal virtues of 
the ancients ; and, therefore, Self-Love has, almost by 
common consent, assumed to itself a virtuous char- 
acter. 

But then Self-Love, it must be duly considered, is 



288 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. ii. 

only one of the motives of prudence. I am bound to 
be benevolent. A care of myself is necessary to the 
welfare of others. Again, I am bound to love duty. 
The care of myself is necessary to the enjoyment of 
duty. I am bound to obey God. There are many 
motives for prudence. And Self-Love, on its own 
account, is not the virtuous motive. Nor has it on its 
own account a virtuous character. 

Why some men have thought it a sin, we shall 
afterwards explain. But Self-Love is not a sin in it- 
self. It becomes mixed, with sin only through the 
want of benevolence. Self-Love is like the ball of the 
eye, which anatomists tell us is totally without feeling. 
It has neither one character nor the other, but is indif- 
ferent as to the quality of virtue. 



CHAPTER X. 

OF NATURAL AFFECTION. 

Keeping our eye, however, upon obvious differ- 
ences, we must not say the same in respect to Natural 
Affection. The idea so often broached, that Natural 
Affection is not of a virtuous character, labors with 
many difficulties ; for, in the first place, it is contra- 
dicted by conscience. If a man disregard his offspring, 
we pronounce it a sin. Moreover it is contradicted by 
Scripture ; for the astorgoi, or, as the word is translated, 
those " without natural affection," are mentioned by 
the Apostle Paul in the list of the most outrageous 
sinners. The love of a husband for a wife, or of a 
father for a son, or of a niece for her uncle, are certainly 
virtues ; and yet it would be impossible to believe, 
that each of these inaugurates a separate moral dis- 



Chap. X.] Of Natural Affection. 289 

tinction, or, in fact, that there are as many virtues as 
there are relations among men. 

The light that is to be shed upon these difficulties 
depends upon the fact that benevolence is regulated 
by circumstances. I cannot love a being till I know 
something of him. A stranger on a distant planet is 
out of the reach of my benevolence. I cannot love a 
being so much as when I know more about him, or he 
is living near me. And, therefore, the Bible commands 
me to love my neighbor. I cannot love a being so 
much who is of another nation, or of another race ; 
and these differences are in the nature of the case. 
Benevolence remains the same, a simple and unchange- 
able virtue ; but it is constitutionally affected by cir- 
cumstances ; and Natural Affection is, therefore, a 
compound. It is partly an instinct, and that far has 
no virtue ; but it is also benevolence, and benevolence 
kindled by the most favoring appeal. If a man has no 
benevolence when the objects of it are placed at his 
fireside, and when the warmth of it is increased by an 
instinct, he must be singularly low down in his benev- 
olent susceptibility. And, therefore, the Bible gives 
us little credit for this sort of benevolence, for it says, 
" If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall your Father 
which is in heaven give good things to them that ask 
him ! " 

Natural affection, therefore, is a compound phe- 
nomenon, made up partly of benevolence, in which 
respect it is moral, but partly also of an instinct which 
constitutes a favoring circumstance (along with others) 
for benevolence itself. 
13 



290 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II, 



CHAPTER XI. 

OF THE LOVE OF GOOD MEN. 



The like may be said of the Love of Good Men. 
The Love of Good Men is a compound phenomenon, 
made up of common benevolence, heightened and 
made warmer by a love of the Moral Quality.* 



CHAPTER XII. 

OF GRATITUDE. 

And the like may be said of Gratitude. It is an 
instance of common benevolence, heightened and made 
warmer by a love to benevolence itself; and that be- 
nevolence particularly attracting our attention, because 
it was a benevolence exercised toward us.f 

I am not saying that I have given all the phenomena 
connected with these different affections ; particularly 
all the phenomena of the different duties that flow 
from them. For example, love to God is immediately 
followed by the duty of unreserved obedience. But 
then obedience to God flows also from the duty of 
benevolence, as well as from the obligation to love 

* Here it will be observed, both are virtues. But yet so much lower 
is benevolence when assisted by these favoring circumstances, that the 
Bible recommends it when it stands unaided by any ; for " for -a good 
man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love 
toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us " 
(Rom. v. 7, 8). 

f Where also the Bible testifies that it is benevolence, and not the 
favoring circumstances, that constitute the virtue ; but that, on the con- 
trary, benevolence is the more praiseworthy, the less it is assisted. For 
"if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for 
sinners also do even the same " (Luke vi. 33). 



Chap. XIII.] Of Justice. 291 

Him ; because the duty of obedience is necessary to 
the general welfare. So also of the exercise of grati- 
tude ; it is for the general good. We have not ex- 
hausted our analysis, but sufficiently indicated that all 
may be included in fewer and more original affections. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

OF JUSTICE. 

The same may be said of Justice. 

Justice is a name for a great many different 
things. 

It has three meanings, like those that may be found 
in Virtue. That is, it means first the quality of which 
we speak when we speak of the justice of certain feel- 
ings. It means, secondly, the feelings in which this 
just quality is found ; and it means, thirdly, the char- 
acter of the persons to whom the feelings that possess 
this just quality belong. It is in the second of these 
three senses that we wish to speak of justice when we 
ask if we are obliged to consider it as a separate and 
independent virtue. 

Justice, moreover, has a great many different mean- 
ings in each of the three senses in which we have con- 
sidered it. It means virtue in the general. It means 
honesty. It means strictness in governing, including, 
on the one hand, strictness in rewards, and on the 
other, strictness in punishment. It has been divided 
into general, commutative, distributive, and vindicatory 
justice ; a division, however, which can be of but small 
philosophical account, because it is all an illogical 
jumble ; general justice including all the rest, and dis- 
tributive, which is defined to be " the giving of every 
one his due," being much the same as general, or, at 



292 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

least, certainly including vindicatory, and, in this way, 
overleaping all the bounds of a metaphysical division. 
To follow justice, therefore, into all the windings of 
popular speech, would be utterly impossible. And we 
have thought that we would take two great instances 
of it, which, if they are not the great meanings of the 
word, are nevertheless sufficient as examples of how 
entirely it may be included under the forms of our 
original virtues. Honesty, which is one of the two, is to 
be considered in the present connection ; and rectitude, 
as it is applied to government, that is, strictness in 
rewarding, and strictness in punishing, will be taken up 
when rewards and punishments come to be the subject of 
inquiry. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

OF HONESTY. 

If a poor widow, living alone, and with no one to 
depend upon but herself, has scraped together through 
the toils of a laborious life a poor pittance against the 
infirmities of age, and some man with no shadow of a 
right robs her and takes all that she possesses, it would 
seem to be an imperfect statement of the moralities of 
the case to say that benevolence had been grossly vio- 
lated. Is there not such a thing as an original justice? 
Or is it true that a regard for the welfare of others, 
followed of course by its obligation as virtuous, and by 
the command of the Almighty, is all that is to restrain 
us from robbery and fraud ? 

Holding that there is nothing else than this, we 
challenge the party that may differ to tell us what that 
other thing is. What is it ? Is it a love for others' 
rights ? What we call for is a distinct expression that 
may serve to be an account of an original virtue. 



Chap. XIV.] Of Honesty. 293 

I. It cannot be a love for others' rights, because, 
under that word is included an endless variety of mean- 
ings. There are rights that come to us by war and 
accident. Indeed there are all possible varieties ; rights 
of law, and rights of equity ; and these opposite often- 
times ; rights that cannot be maintained in the forum of 
conscience, and yet that cannot be denied in the forum 
of human adjudication : rights of discovery and rights 
of possession, and rights of whimsical technicality, that 
nevertheless are held sacred by men. How can that 
be an original affection that has for its object a vast 
multiplicity of things ? 

II. Again ; justice has exceptions. The poor widow 
would be sacrificed for the benefit of the state. A 
cargo would be thrown overboard for the safety of a 
vessel. Fortunes would be squandered, or houses 
blown up, for the gaining of a battle ; and property 
might be seized upon in cases of starvation. We hold 
everything at the call of a higher principle. And how 
can that be a primordial right which becomes wrong or 
the opposite according to our need? 

III. Observe, this is not the case with benevolence. 
Benevolence has no exception. We are to love even 
our enemies. Nor is there any exception in the love 
of virtue. Benevolence, therefore, and the love of the 
moral quality might be proved to be the only virtues by 
this fact, that they are the only forms of obligation 
that admit of no exception. 

IV. And moreover, fourthly, when we come to con- 
sider what the exceptions are, they are all on the one 
principle of the general welfare. 

V. And, therefore, I say, fifthly, that as the one 
principle of the general welfare accounts for the excep- 
tions of justice, so, a fortiori, may it account for justice 



294 Ethics, [B. iv. pt. tii. d. ii. 

itself; for if a regard for the general good is so potent 
as to put away the equities of ordinary administration, 
then benevolence must be higher than justice ; that is, 
it must stand higher in logic ; that is, it must go nearer 
to the origin of right ; I mean by that, justice must be 
derived from benevolence, because, in the last appeal, 
it yields to the consideration of the public good. 

Now let me not be mistaken. I do not mean that 
a care for that poor widow is all that should restrain 
the man from defrauding her of property : but that the 
general welfare makes necessary a general law, and that 
that law must be very exact, and that that exactness 
must reach even to the slenderest obligations ; and 
that when that law is set up, then duty comes in to 
press it ; because benevolence is followed by a recog- 
nition of duty, and that duty becomes interlocked by 
all species of confirmation ; by the command of God ; 
by the need of example ; by a respect for ourselves ; 
and by all the forms of the interlacing of duty by which 
two simple virtues can combine in all the forms of ob- 
ligation for men. 

It is not, therefore, benevolence in this simple case 
that keeps the man's hand off the property of his 
neighbor ; but benevolence grown into an intelligent 
system, and that system enjoined by the authority of 
the Almighty, and recognized by its wisdom as essen- 
tial in the very constitution of affairs. 



CHAPTER XV. 

OF TRUTHFULNESS. 

The same wisdom makes it necessary that one man 
should tell the truth to his neighbor. 



Chap. XV.] Of Truthfulness. 295 

But if truthfulness aspire to be itself an original 
virtue, we have of course a right to inquire what it de- 
fines itself distinctly to be. 

Truthfulness is not a love of truth on our own ac- 
count ; for then it would run into all the departments of 
philosophy and science. Truthfulness, therefore, is more 
properly a love of the possession of truth by others ; 
or to put others in possession of the truth ; or, if we 
might make the matter somewhat more complicated, 
perhaps, it is a principle such that if we intimate any- 
thing in the presence of others, we ought not to de- 
ceive them. Truthfulness, therefore, is the attribute 
which refuses to deceive. 

I. Now, that it is not an original attribute we argue, 
first, because it has many exceptions. God tells J oshua 
to set an ambush behind the City of Ai, and thus he 
deceives and defeats them. He tells Samuel when 
he fears to go up to anoint David king over Israel, 
Take a heifer with thee and say, I am come to sacri- 
fice. And though it may be said, 'Benevolence has cer- 
tain practical exceptions : we refrain to do good to 
others in certain cases of practical necessity:' yet, 
when we come to consider it, it is at the call of benev- 
olence itself. We refrain to do good to others for the 
sake of some higher design of benevolence. But who 
can say that we fail to tell the truth for the sake of 
some higher design of truthfulness ? 

II. No ; and, therefore, truthfulness finds its ex- 
ceptions outside of itself. 

III. And, thirdly, truthfulness, being controlled by 
benevolence in such a way that when its exceptions 
come up we find them dictated by the public good, 
the only question that remains is, whether the public 
good may not account for truthfulness. A fortiori, if 



2g6 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. ill. D. II. 

the public good may impair and make exceptions to 
truthfulness, may it not be the occasion of truthfulness 
itself? In other words, if truthfulness be a great and 
important blessing, and in its highest exactness fully 
accounted for by benevolence, and yet sometimes sub- 
ject to exceptions, and those exceptions prompted by 
benevolence itself, is not the demonstration complete 
that benevolence is the origin of truthfulness, and that 
except so far as it is enjoined by the authority of 
God, or laid on us by other obligations because it is 
benevolent, benevolence is the only source of the 
obligation of truthfulness? 

CHAPTER XVI. 

OF CHASTITY. 

In chastity we find the peculiar illustration of a 
virtue in which exceptions are made by the very ordi- 
nance of God. Chastity in any way that we can define 
it forbids things that were the law in the family of 
Adam, and that were announced in statutes by God 
on Sinai. Truthfulness may have exceptions in cases 
of necessity ; or honesty, in cases of starvation ; but 
chastity has had exceptions for a whole age together. 
And when it is said, " Moses for the hardness of your 
hearts " allowed you certain liberal concessions, that 
does not mean that it was not lawful, but that chastity 
was a dictate of benevolence, and that where polygamy, 
for example (to take one instance out of the many), 
became a less evil than its inexorable prohibition, " for 
the hardness of their hearts " God adjusted his com- 
mandent, making it lawful to marry many wives, not 
that it was not a prodigious evil* but that the mischiefs 
in the case were less than of its rigid prohibition. 



Chap. XVII. Proof from Scripture. 297 

Now this does not prove that polygamy in our day 
is right ; for God has again prohibited it ; but it proves 
that it is subject to His ordinance, and that it is not in 
this respect like benevolence, which is always an obli- 
gation ; but that it is, like the aberrations of justice, 
to be directed by the law of the Most High. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

PROOF FROM SCRIPTURE. 

We come next to Scripture. 

In the 13th chapter of the Romans we. have a pas- 
sage which in a remarkably accurate way states all that 
we have said in respect to benevolence. Indeed, it 
would be hard to imagine how language could be more 
philosophical. The Apostle is saying, " Render to all 
what is owing ( T ac b^eudi) ; tribute to whom tribute ; cus- 
tom to whom custom ; fear to whom fear ; honor to 
whom honor " : and then, for the manifest purpose of 
showing how reasonable these exactions were, he says, 
" You do not owe any man anything (p&w ^Iv b^ilere) but 
to love one another." And though, by an unfortunate 
translation, the imperative* has been put for the indic- 
ative — "Owe no man anything" — yet the context 
sufficiently corrects it. The indicative and the imper- 
ative are of course the same in the original, and it is 
left to the reader entirely to decide in the case. 

* Perhaps, however, the imperative must stand on account of the 
peculiar negative (though eminent scholars, Reiche, Koppe, Rosenmuller, 
Bohme, Flatt, Erasmus, Qo not think so), but we must count it an in- 
dicative-imperative such as was of usage in the East ; as, for example, 
where Christ says, " What thou doest do quickly," or where the prophet 
says, " Make the heart of this people gross " ; which we are never to 
understand as a usual imperative, but as a more than usually asseverat- 
ing indicative (1875). 

13* 



298 Ethics. [b. iv. Pt. hi. d. 11. 

But the Apostle goes on. He not only tells the 
Romans that it was interesting to perform our obliga- 
tions because all were a part of the duty of mutual 
benevolence, but he tells this more plainly, — " He that 
loveth another hath fulfilled the law." And then he 
goes on to particularize. " For, Thou shalt not com- 
mit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, 
Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet ; 
and if there be any other commandment, — it is briefly 
comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself." These, you perceive, are the 
very obligations we have been considering. And the 
duty not to steal and not to commit adultery ; that is, 
the duties of honesty and chastity, and the duty not to 
lie, and not to kill, and, as the Apostle says, " if there 
be any other" duty, — they are summarily comprehended 
in this,— which is nothing more than the duty of com- 
mon benevolence. " Love worketh no ill to his neigh- 
bor ; therefore," says the Apostle, proving his serious- 
ness by the philosophy of an abundant explanation, — 
" therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law." 

Now the other important Scripture that I will bring 
into notice is where Christ tells an insidious questioner 
that on two commandments, namely, " Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God," and, " Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor," — are summed up all the law and the prophets. 

He is no longer speaking of mere obligations to 
others (rag b<j>eiMg), but is speaking of the whole law, and 
we might imagine that he would divest it of all meta- 
physical abstraction, and speak in the common language 
of secular men. He does not, therefore, say, Thou 
shalt love other beings ; though the command, Love 
thy neighbor, includes, of course, duty to animals and 
all the objects of compassion. Nor does he say, Thou 



Chap. XVIII.] Are the Two Virtues Equal? 299 

shalt love the moral principle; though the command, 
Love thy Maker, is formed, as we have shown, upon 
the basis of our obligation to holiness, but he says, 
" Love the Lord thy God," as a far more useful way 
of commanding our affection for holiness, and " Love 
thy neighbor," as a far more popular style of enforcing 
benevolence among men. 

But, strictly, the passage says, that there are but 
two commandments ; certainly it says, that on these 
two commandments hang all the law and the prophets; 
and unquestionably, if these two commandments ape 
not adoringly to honor holiness and warmly to love 
our fellows, it lies with a different exposition to explain 
to us their original meaning. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

WHETHER ONE OF THE TWO VIRTUES IS EQUAL TO THE OTHER. 

One of the two virtues is undoubtedly equal to the 
other in its claim of being original ; but whether equal 
in degree will best appear by asking whether their 
objects are equal. Holiness on its own account is the 
object of the one, and we are to compare it with the 
object of the other ; and though no reason can be 
given, yet our own consciousness declares, that holiness 
is in itself the higher object. Benevolence, therefore, 
yields to its sister virtue, not in the sense of being 
dependent or derived, but in the sense of being feebler; 
the welfare of others being a poorer object of desire 
than the no more original desideratum, the quality of 
virtue. 



300 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II 



CHAPTER XIX. 

WHETHER BENEVOLENCE IS ALWAYS EQUAL TO ITSELF. 

The welfare of others is not only a poorer object 
of desire than the no more original object, the quality 
of virtue, but it is also a poorer object of desire in one 
instance of benevolence than another. I cannot love 
an animal with the same earnestness that I do an intel- 
ligent being ; and, therefore, I sacrifice animals. I 
cannot love an individual neighbor more, other things 
being equal, than I love myself; and, therefore, the 
Bible commands me to love my neighbor as myself. I 
cannot love an individual neighbor as much, other 
things being equal, as I can a million ; and, therefore, 
I am to sacrifice one to many. I am to love a world 
of mankind more than I do any single individual. 
And, therefore, I am to love a world more than I do 
myself. 

Accordingly Paul says, " I could wish myself 
accursed from Christ for my brethren my kinsmen 
according to the flesh ; " and though this passage has 
been the ground of error, yet never in respect to 
benevolence. Till we come to speak of holiness it is 
clear enough. Paul loves the happiness of Israel, as 
he necessarily must, more, whether temporally or eter- 
nally, than his own felicity. 

" Hereby know we love," says the Apostle John, 
discoursing on the very evidence of our own conver- 
sion ; (and we regret that just at this point our trans- 
lators should have clouded the sense by inserting 
Italics, — " Hereby perceive we the love of God ; ") 
" Hereby know we love ; " (just as on other occa- 
sions he has said, " Hereby know we the spirit of 



Chap. XX.] All Holinesses not Equal. 301 

truth/' or, " Hereby know we that He abideth in us ; ") 
" Hereby know we love, that He laid down His life 
for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the 
brethren." 

Moses, when he cried, " If not, then blot me out of 
thy book," may be a subject of criticism in respect to 
its bearing upon his holiness ; but in respect to its 
bearing upon his happiness, he had a right, — nay, it 
was his duty, to prefer all to one ; and, therefore, to 
desire the salvation of his race in a style that would be 
fatal to his own inheritance. 



CHAPTER XX. 

WHETHER THE OTHER VIRTUE IS ALWAYS EQUAL TO ITSELF. 

But whether the other virtue is always equal to 
itself; depending, of course, upon the question whether 
the moral quality is always equal to itself, — is a much 
more delicate subject of inquiry. Happiness we must 
put far off at the very opening of our investigation. 
The love of happiness must not only yield to the love 
of holiness, and that whether it be for ourselves or others, 
but must never come into the account. The moral 
quality is so superior to others' welfare that they can 
never come into comparison. The highest measure of 
one can never match the lowest farthing of the other ; 
because virtue is perfectly imperative. God's infinite 
felicity could not be a match for the slightest betrayal 
into the smallest crime. 

Virtue, however, having this sort of imperativeness, 
has it only in the form that I have described. Its im- 
perativeness does not consist in its being infinite ; for 
then all forms of virtue would be precisely on a par. 
It matters not who should be the being, whether saint 



302 Ethics, [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II, 

or angel, nor would it matter what should be the action. 
The making of a world, and the sparing of an ant or 
caterpillar, would be precisely on a level. 

The measure of virtue, therefore, is not always 
alike ; and whether the love of it is so, is an easy ques- 
tion. If the measure of virtue is not always alike, the 
love of it is similar. The love to God must be greater 
than the love to man ; the love of one action greater 
than of one confessedly lower, even when both actions 
are perfect ; Gabriel, a higher object of affection than 
inferior excellences. And even when we understand 
objects better, that is a valid ground for a higher exer- 
cise of virtue. 

As God, therefore, is infinitely excellent, God, under 
the eye of a Divine Nature, should be infinitely ap- 
proved. God, under the eye of God, appearing in 
His excellence, becomes, so, an object of infinite affec- 
tion ; but God to man is not infinite ; God to man 
grows, and, therefore, there is but one instance of infi- 
nite affection. God to man changes, and, therefore, 
our love to Him is not infinite ; nor does He claim that 
it should be. All that He desires of us is, that we 
should love the Lord our God with all our soul and 
strength. 

But if the love of man to the Almighty is not infi- 
nite, much less is his love to any inferior degree of 
moral elevation. Our love of virtue, therefore, is of 
all degrees. And taking care only to keep up that fact 
of its imperativeness, and to make virtue prevalent 
over all measures of felicity, we can reason about holi- 
ness, and prefer it, the one case over the other, just as 
as we did the object of benevolence. 

The holiness of God is more important than any 
other reality. This is the end of the universe. We 



Chap. XX.] All Holinesses not Equal. 303 

have reached a point that is the highest in the affec- 
tions of man. 

And if the holiness of God is the greatest end of 
the universe, of course I am to desire it more even 
than my own holiness. I cannot be a sinner. I can- 
not transgress a precept even though it be for the honor 
of God. I cannot sin to uphold the universe, or to 
uphold the Almighty. The thing is preposterous ; for 
sin admits of no license. But I can coolly think, that 
my holiness is less than the holiness of God, and I can 
cooly say, " Let God be true," and, as a mere comparison 
of relative desires, all the world may sink into apostasy. 
The Apostle, we deliberately believe, meant that. 

So now in respect to his wishing himself accursed 
from Christ ; — If God's holiness- is more important than 
the holiness of man, the holiness of man is more im- 
portant than the holiness of one ; and I can throw that 
fact into an expressive proposition. I cannot consent 
to sin; and it would be infamous in me to be willing 
to be eternally a sinner. And it would be infamous in 
me to be eternally a sinner even for the salvation of 
humanity. But then we are immediately to consider, 
What is being a sinner ? Being a sinner is the opposite 
of being holy. Being holy is to possess two positive 
affections. To possess two positive affections is to be 
holy in all the sense in which being holy can possibly 
be conceived. Now these affections are love of other 
beings, which of course permits us to love others more 
than we do ourselves, and (as the only remaining vir- 
tue) love of holiness. 

Now the difficulty seems to be that Paul could not 
say, I could wish myself accursed from Christ, without 
compromitting this last affection. And we are willing 
to admit that if Paul had said, • I could sin for my. 



304 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

brethren, my kindred according to the flesh,' it would 
be inconsistent. But what is sin? It is, not loving 
others, and not having an affection for holiness. Now, 
if Paul had said, ' I could be unbenevolent,' or, ' I 
could be unregardful of holiness, for my brethren 
according to the flesh,' that would be preposterous and 
wicked. But what does he say ? ' I am so withered by 
the idea of a whole nation being given up to sin, that 
is, I love holiness so much, that I make the obvious 
comparison of one man's holiness as compared with 
many ; and, as every ideal comparison is capable of 
being translated into speech, I merely utter it : — that, 
out of regard to that higher excellency the love of 
which is the first and great commandment, I would 
rather see that excellency spread over the world than 
to see it possessed by any individual believer.' 

Nor are we saying here more than what every one 
believes. What every one believes is, that a thousand 
sinners are more to be mourned over than the existence 
of one. If that one happens to be I myself, that does 
not alter a certain form of the proposition when we 
come to a comparison. And what I mean is, that that 
form of the proposition is the one intended by Paul. 
When he says, " I could wish myself accursed from 
Christ," he means, that the high character of millions 
was more important than the guarding of his own, 
and that he had rather those millions should be saved 
than that he himself should be kept from eternal 
undoing. 

If any one says, This means that he would be will- 
ing to sin, I retract so much as by any possibility 
could mean that, — and I keep his mind undividedly to 
this proposition, that Paul meant, only what he him- 
self must believe to be true, — that the holiness and 



Chap. XXI. J The Tilings Moral in God. 305 

happiness of a nation were more to be desired, than 
the holiness and happiness of any conceivable believer. 
This much we suppose every one will admit. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

OF WHAT THINGS ARE MORAL IN GOD. 

THOSE things that are moral themselves are moral 
also in the Almighty. 

The doctrine that no things are moral in them- 
selves, but are made moral by the will of the Al- 
mighty, is the only doctrine that can oppose this 
simple proposition. 

That no things are moral in themselves, would 
make no things moral in the Almighty; for I take it 
that it is an easy reasoning, that if God makes things 
moral, there can be nothing moral to Him. More- 
over, if He makes things moral, He might make im- 
moral things moral ; that is, originally He might make 
benevolence and love of virtue, which are confessedly 
right, shamefully and universally wrong ; and destroy 
altogether the present system. 

If it be said, ' He is too wise for this,' then there 
is an original virtue ; for if originally what is indiscrim- 
inately right, is made wrong by the will of the Almighty, 
— then it is evident He has no liberty of will, or things 
are made wrong or right according to His pleasure. 
And, moreover, having no principle for Himself, but 
being obliged to make one by the freedom of His will, 
His holiness is only to be adored for being the object 
of His choice, and not on the principle of having any 
peculiar excellency. 

These postulates are so absurd that we mean to 
pass on as though no such things were ever enter- 



306 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

tained ; and those things that are moral in themselves 
being moral also in the Almighty, we return to that 
region of thought where we discover that benevolence 
and the love of virtue are the only things that are 
themselves virtuous. 

Benevolence and the love of virtue being the only 
things that are themselves virtuous, benevolence and 
the love of virtue are the only virtues in the Almighty. 
And so, John, speaking of the virtue of benevolence, 
descants upon it in this wise, " Which thing is true in 
Him and in you ; '' meaning that its eternal obliga- 
tion belongs as well to God as to man. We are created 
in His image, as the Bible repeatedly declares. And 
our Saviour, when He wishes to press in the furthest 
climax, a love of enemies, says, " Pray for them which 
despitefully use you, that ye may be the children of 
your Father which is in Heaven " ; and then explains 
this reference to their relation, by saying, " For He 
maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and 
sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." 

Benevolence and the love of virtue, therefore, are 
the only virtues in the Almighty. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

of god's love to his own happiness. 

Happiness being an object which it is no virtue to 
pursue, but yet which it is right to pursue if we pursue 
it no farther than its own importance, it is right in man 
to pursue his own happiness as far as he does his neigh- 
bor's : and it would be right in God to pursue His by 
a corresponding measure of relation. 

As therefore the happiness of God is more impor- 
tant than the happiness of the universe, it would be 



Chap. XXIII.] God's Love to His own Holiness. 307 

right in God to pursue His own happiness more than 
the happiness of the universe. But as the happiness 
of the universe can never interfere with the happiness 
of God, the happiness of God being infinite, and the 
very infinitude that makes it infinite being indepen- 
dent of the happiness of men, the two things can never 
come into competition. The happiness of God, there- 
fore, can never interfere with the happiness of the 
universe. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

of god's love to his own holiness. 

The holiness of God is not very different in respect 
to its bearing upon others. 

The holiness of God is the greatest object of His 
nature. Holiness, being most excellent in itself, is in- 
finite in case of the Almighty. His desire for it, there- 
fore, is boundless. Having no object above it in the 
scale, there is nothing beyond it in the region of his 
pursuits. The holiness of God, therefore, is the highest 
object in the universe. 

The holiness of God being the highest object in the 
universe, it is the ^m ,* or excellence, that is gener- 
ally translated glory. The glory of God, being the 
great end of His being, means his holiness. The* idea 
that has conferred this honor upon the display of it, is 
a singular mistake. If the display of His glory be the 
great end of the excellence of God, then what is the 
great end of that? We may reduce it to absurdity by 
going behind it. But if the holiness of God be the 
great end itself, there our inquiry must pause. The 
display of His holiness centres His object upon man. 

* Literally, weight. 



308 Ethics. [b. iv. Pt. hi. D. II, 

And how absurd it is, that, for centuries together, an 
object that centres in the creature should have been 
thought the highest object of our Great Creator ! 

If, therefore, the holiness of God is the great object 
of all His being, the question arises whether it ever 
interferes with the holiness of man; for as all things 
else must yield to it, if the holiness of God ever inter- 
feres with the holiness of man, the universe is less holy 
than if there had been no such interference. We want 
to see whether this supreme desire, namely, for His own 
holiness, could ever interfere with the holiness of His 
creation ; because we would like to show that if it 
does not, then the next most supreme desire, viz. for 
the holiness of all beyond Him, has an undivided and 
unmitigated sway in His soul. 

Now, what is the love of His own holiness? The 
love of His own holiness, in God, is the love of His 
own benevolence toward other beings, and the love of 
His own regard for moral excellence. The love of His 
own benevolenee for other beings cannot make Him 
less benevolent toward them, or do them less good ; 
and the love of His own regard for moral excellence 
cannot make Him care less for the moral excellence of 
all His creatures. Though the love of His own moral 
excellence, therefore, is supreme, it cannot hinder that 
the love of others' moral excellence should appear as 
though it were supreme ; and therefore the love of 
God for the moral excellence of all the universe, is 
just the same as though it were the leading feature 
of His excellence. 



Chap. XXIV.] God's Love to Others Holiness. 309 



CHAPTER XXIV. 
OF god's love to the holiness of others. 

God's love to the holiness of others, is, therefore, 
as great as it could be, having no possible impediment. 
And as He is an omnipotent God, and has no other 
impediment in His nature, and this is His leading 
desire,* there is no reason why it should not have been 
granted. God's universe, therefore, is as holy as it 
could possibly have been made. 

As each part of the universe is dear to Him in its 
relative part, each part of the universe is as holy as 
was consistent with the whole ; and each part of the 
universe, in the ages to come, will be as holy as this 
supreme affection of the Almighty, combined with 
His omniscience, can possibly cause it to be. 

The Christian, therefore, who has fallen under no 
ban of the Empire, and who has been left in no state 
demanding his eternal confusion, will be lifted all 
lengths, and will be carried all heights of perfection, 
and will be raised as near to the Almighty, as the plan 
of the universe will possibly devise. 

The lost would be made holy, if it were not for 
invincible demurs. 

And insects would be lifted into men, and the 
universe incredibly enlarged and promoted, if it had 
not received, each moment, the highest promotions 
of the Almighty. 

These are some consequences of God's love to the 
holiness of,others. 

* Next to His own holiness, which" we have seen does not interfere 
with it. 



3io Ethics. [B. IV. Pt/III. D. II. 

CHAPTER XXV. 
of god's love to the happiness of others. 

God's love to the happiness of others is of course 
altogether secondary. The slightest consideration of 
holiness would at once command it all away. Yet 
God's love, like the atmosphere, presses upon all His 
works. Like the atmosphere, it presses everywhere ; 
and steals into every crevice that holiness (which is 
weightier) will allow. 

Hence, benevolence is unlimited. And we make a 
distinction here between unlimited, and infinite. Be- 
nevolence is not infinite, because it is. greater or less ; 
but benevolence is unlimited, because it clamors end- 
lessly. It has no limit in benevolence itself. It has 
no limit, except in some higher principle, why it should 
not make an angel of a man, or why it should not lift 
the wicked to the highest or holiest felicity. It taketh 
no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, but that all 
should repent and live. It so loved the world as to 
give the Only Begotten Son. And it has this glorious 
reality for the Christian, that he may know that God will 
do all for His vineyard that can possibly be done ; that 
He doth not afflict willingly ; that He is kind to the 
unthankful ; and that, even in respect to the depraved, 
His tender mercies are over all His works. 

Yet though benevolence is so great ; for the simple 
reason that holiness is greater, men are punished, and 
millions sink into eternal ruin. Wherever holiness 
comes into collision with happiness, happiness must 
yield ; and therefore we are back at our premise, that 
God will make this the holiest possible universe even 
at the expense of wickedness and misery. 



Chap. XXVI.] Of Sin. 3 1 1 

The only question is, whether the holiest possible 
universe must not necessarily be the happiest possible ; 
and as it would be utterly preposterous that the oppo- 
site of this could be maintained, we believe we have 
arrived at both the propositions, — that, while this uni- 
verse is the holiest possible in spite of its being tinc- 
tured by the presence of sin, it is on this very account 
the happiest possible in spite of its being afflicted by 
being an abode of misery. 

This universe, therefore, is the best possible universe. 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

OF SIN. 

Postponing all consequences till a time when we 
have more thoroughly brought out the features of our 
system, we go next to what stands opposite to virtue, 
I mean, the evil of sin. 

We had supposed that the expression, sin, would 
be found to agree in the number of its meanings, with 
the expression, virtue ; and accordingly had determined 
to say that sin means the quality of wickedness, or sec- 
ondly, what is wicked itself, or, thirdly, the character 
of him who does the wickedness. It was much to our 
surprise that we remembered that it means only the 
second. 

We hear, indeed, of the sin of a certain action ; and, 
in a still more restricted instance, of the sin of a certain 
character ; but, on examining the sense, we find that it 
means the sinning, or actual transgression. It does 
not mean the quality of the act, or the character of the 
person, but the sin that is committed ; and we have 
only to prove this by substituting the word sinfulness, 
when a nice ear will detect, that the sin of an act and 



312 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

the sinfulness of an act are not entirely synonymous ; 
but that one means the sin which the act is understood 
to commit, and the other the quality of sinfulness that 
belongs to the commission. 

Accordingly, the term " Original Sin " is perhaps 
not well chosen for the fact that is intended. The 
transgression of Adam, or our share of it, or our origi- 
nal trespass, if any such thing were intended in the 
view of theology, might be called original sin ; but origi- 
nal character, which is the idea intended to be con- 
veyed, ought only to be called original sinfulness. 

At any rate, in this treatise, sin will be only those 
things that possess the moral quality, and sinfulness (i) 
the character, and (2) the moral quality itself. 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

OF THE QUALITY OF SINFULNESS. 

The quality of sinfulness is a simple idea. It is 
the opposite of virtue, but cannot be defined by it. It 
cart be understood only by being conceived by the con- 
science. It cannot be analyzed ; and, therefore, can- 
not be discussed as an object of philosophy. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

OF WHAT THINGS ARE SINFUL. 

BUT though the quality of sinfulness cannot be de- 
fined (though we have a very clear conception of it 
from the disapprobation of conscience), yet we can tell 
what things are sinful. " 

There are but two sinful things, want of benevo- 
lence, and want of love to the moral quality. These 
two make up all the iniquity that exists in the creation. 



Chap. XXIX.] Proof of but Two Sins. 3 1 3 

The evil that falls upon the universe, falls upon it 
for these two sins. And Hell has eternal punishment 
for nothing but want of benevolence and want of love 
to the moral quality. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

PROOF THAT THERE ARE BUT TWO SINS. 

It might seem that the proof that there are but two 
sins, is contained in the proof that there are but two vir- 
tues, — that we have but to consider what are the 
opposites of benevolence and the love of virtue, to be 
able to infer, with a good degree of probability, our 
only sins ; but, now, in the first place, not only is this 
a thing not altogether to be taken for granted, but, 
in the second, the opposites of virtue are not altogether 
so easy to be declared. 

For example, there are three sets of opposite affec- 
tions, either of which might be possessed of the attrib- 
ute of sinfulness. The love of others and the love of 
virtue may be opposed, in the first place, to the love 
of self and the love of wickedness. Again, the love 
of others and the love of virtue may be opposed, in 
the second place, to what may be equally regarded 
their opposites, viz. the hatred of others and the 
hatred of virtue ; and, then, in the third place, benevo- 
lence and the love of virtue may be opposed to the 
want of benevolence and to the want of the love of the 
moral quality. 

These six phenomena of mind are all in their nature 
sinful, except self-love, which becomes sinful when it 
degenerates into selfishness ; and the only way in which 
we can prove that they are not all six equally original, 
is to look at them one by one, and to show that all but 
14 



« 

3 H Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. hi. D. II. 

two are forms or instances of the two that we have 
already suggested. 

We shall alter the order a little ; and as the love 
of wickedness can be best considered when we have a 
better idea of wickedness itself, we will put that the 
last of the four, and show that they are, all alike, deriv- 
ative or else complex iniquities. 

CHAPTER XXX. 

OF SELF-LOVE. , • 

SELF-LOVE, in itself considered, is, in a moral point, 
entirely indifferent. Benevolence being a great pri- 
mary virtue, self-love, in itself considered, may be con- 
spicuously right, and yet may afford the exercise in 
which the want of benevolence may be found to appear. 
For example, it is right to love my neighbor no better 
than I do myself, where circumstances make the com- 
parison a fair one. If, therefore, I love my neighbor 
less than I do myself, self-love becomes, so to speak, 
the kakophoron, or sin-bearing exercise of mind. Benev- 
olence, in that case, being a negative quantity, the want 
of it shows itself in the overgrowth of principles other- 
wise indifferent. And covetousness and selfishness 
(which, by the way, may be defined to be that measure 
of self-love which exceeds our love to our neighbor) and 
theft and any principle that sacrifices others to ourselves 
become wrong, not because self-love is itself a principle 
of evil, but because it manifests the other. The want 
of benevolence, being a negative, and therefore unable 
to exhibit itself, it is a parasite, and grows upon its 
neighbors, and therefore all exercises become equally 
depraved in which there is manifested a want of this 
original benevolence. 



Chap. XXXI.] Of Malevolence. 3 1 5 

And so of the love of virtue. Selfishness is also 
manifested where self-love has outgrown an affection 
for holiness. It is not that self-love is wicked, but that 
the man is not willing to mortify himself or crucify 
himself at the call of virtue. 

And now to prove that self-love is not wicked in it- 
self, we have only to remember that the wicked have 
no more self-love than the righteous (except in pro- 
portion). God has more self-love than His creatures. 
Angels have more self-love than we have, and probably 
to a wonderful degree. Heaven has more self-love 
than the earth. And as men grow old in wickedness, 
self-love crumbles away. And it is the keen, exquisite, 
enlivened ideas of the saint, that open before him the 
highest conceptions of happiness, and therefore the 
highest appreciation of his own felicity. 

Self-love, therefore, is not the measure of selfish- 
ness ; but selfishness is to be measured by the dis- 
parity. A man is selfish to the degree that he loves 
self more than he loves others, or to the degree that 
he loves happiness more than he loves holiness ; and 
the sin, in either example of the two, lies, not in his 
affection for self, but in his want of affection for the 
other objects. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

OF MALEVOLENCE. 

MALEVOLENCE, on the contrary, is not an original 
trespass, not because it is morally indifferent, but be- 
cause originally and on its own account it does not 
exist. We love our own happiness by an original and 
necessary principle of our humanity. We love the 
^happiness of other beings not at all as an original 



3 l6 Ethics. [b. IV. Ft. III. D. II. 

principle, but on account of other affections, which are 
themselves the original transgressions. 

Benevolence and malevolence are so much alike in 
their appearance, that we would fancy they were 
equally at the fountain-head in respect to order, were 
it not that we can prove in respect to the latter, first, 
that originally there is no such thing, and, second, 
that derivatively or in respect to its origin we can 
mark it out and show how it is awakened and con- 
tinued in the mind. 

Originally there is no such thing, because unhappi- 
ness in others is not agreeable in itself, nor is it con- 
ceivable how it can become so except from some other 
inducement that may exist at the time ; moreover, we 
are conscious that, unswayed by self-love, and uninduced 
by some other object than itself, man's unhappiness is 
not a thing that we desire, and not a thing that is 
desirable in any conceivable way on its own account. 

But when we are seeking our own happiness, and 
others thwart us; or when we are seeking our own 
honor, and others stand in our place ; and when we are 
seeking the luxury of power, and others rebel ; then we 
hate and envy them ; but this, you see, falls in with 
the idea, that self-love is at the bottom of malevo- 
lence, and self-love, itself made wicked by a want of be- 
nevolence and of true regard to the principle of virtue. 

For example, we are so constituted as to love our 
own happiness. An instance arises where another 
man diminishes it. As an obvious consequence we 
hate him ; not because his happiness is undesirable in 
itself; but because he has diminished ours; and because 
a want of benevolence and a want of the existence of 
its sister grace give us up to ourselves, and leave us 
to the influence of our own resentment. 



Chap. XXXII.] Of Hatred of Virtue. 317 

The self-love is not the cause of the disease ; nor 
especially is it the feeling of malevolence ; but, instead 
of ''being angry and sinning not," or, as the Bible 
intends it, feeling our injuries and being held in place 
by benevolence and the love of the moral principle, it 
is the want of these principles of government that are 
the sum and centre of our whole malevolence. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

OF HATRED OF VIRTUE. 

This will appear still more strongly of our hatred 
of virtue. The hatred of virtue is not a thing that 
can exist directly and on its own account ; for virtue 
is the love of the happiness of others, and the love of 
a pure benevolence itself, and a love of this very affec- 
tion, and so on, presenting an order of feelings credit- 
able to the race of man, which our own consciousness 
declares never could become objects of hostility ; and 
which, like the azure heavens, or like the starry firma- 
ment, can become invisible on account of the blindness 
of the eye, but never can become repulsive. Holiness, 
therefore, on its own account, as the impenitent declare, 
never can become an object of hostility. 

But when it defrauds us of our pleasures ; when it 
interferes with self-love ; when it condemns us for what 
we have committed ; when it erects a strong barrier 
against pride, and other engagements of the wicked, — 
virtue becomes an enemy, from its opposition. " He 
that doeth evil," says our Saviour, " hateth the light ; " 
and here he gives us all the doctrine that we are pro- 
pounding ; for he declares, that u he hateth the light, 
neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be 
reproved." 



3 J 8 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

Give a man no true benevolence, which is the idea 
we have offered for his original iniquity ; and give him 
no true affection for the quality of virtuous excellence ; 
and give him up to self-love, even though that self- 
love be blunted by the effects of wickedness ; and the 
opposition that he meets, will turn him against virtue 
with the bitterest malignity. 

The hatred of virtue, therefore, is derived from the 
opposition that it gives to our natural appetites ; and 
the sin consequently consists in a want of original love 
to it ; a love that would have sanctified its restraints, 
and made them happy and delightful to the mind. 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 

OF ENMITY TO GOD. 

NOW, if moral excellence, viewed abstractly and 
in itself considered, is not the object of the sinner's 
hatred, neither can it be when it comes to be em- 
bodied in an Infinite Divinity. 

" The carnal mind is enmity against God ; " and 
some have carried that text so far as to say, that enmity 
to God is of the very essence of iniquity. But what is 
it in God that we oppose ? Is it His immensity ? Is 
it His infinity ? Is it that He is all wise, or all pow- 
erful ? Is it supposable that we could be His enemies 
because He is infinitely lovely in any mere grandeur or 
might of His omnipotence ? Or is it the fact, that it 
is His holiness that is the object of hostility ?• And if 
so, must it not observe the rule that we have given ; 
that is, that it is not His holiness itself, but that cross 
upon the sinner that is imposed by His punishment of 
wickedness ? 

" The carnal mind is enmity against God ; " but 



Chap. XXXIV.] Of Love to Wickedness. 319 

then, as a great proof text, we quote the last part of 
the passage, — " because it is not subject to the law of God, 
neither indeed can be" 

It is not the loveliness of God that the sinner de- 
spises ; — His long suffering to us ward, not willing that 
any should perish ; but His tyranny over the wicked, 
as it appears to the man who has no true love to holi- 
ness ; and this our Saviour declares when He says, 
" Me it hateth, because I testify of [the world'] that the 
works thereof are evil" * 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

OF LOVE TO WICKEDNESS. 

So, it is an entire perversion that men love wicked- 
ness on its own account. They love those things that 
possess the wicked quality ; that is, they love sinful 
indulgence ; — nay, they love that lenity that wicked- 
ness observes toward their sins, as compared with the 
rebukes and the comparisons of virtue; but no infa- 
mous quality itself, or hardness of the feeling of benev- 
olence, or crookedness of spirit, can intrinsically be 
felt as agreeable, or a pleasure to the sinner. 

A sinner can love sin because it permits him to be 
sinful ; but that he can love sin by any direct apprecia- 
tion of enjoyment in the quality itself, or of lovable- 
ness either in the want of benevolence or in the want 
of love to the principle of virtue, is an idea incapable 
of proof, and utterly at variance with an understanding 
of the Scripture. 

Our inference, therefore, from all these chapters is, 
that sinfulness is an indefinable quality ; that it is found 

* John vii. 7. 



320 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. Ill, D. II. 

in two negative conditions, a want of benevolence and 
a want of love to the moral quality ; and that these 
two can turn into sin self-love or any affection in which 
they can appear. 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

OF WHAT THINGS WOULD BE SINFUL IN GOD. 

GOD, having, out of the superiority of His nature, 
a benevolence unequalled in its strength, and a love 
of virtue infinite when His own virtue is the object of 
His affection, would be sinful, not only if He wanted 
these, but if He wanted either in that immeasurable 
degree in which they belong to Him as an infinite 
Creator. If He were not more benevolent than Gabriel, 
He would be more sinful than Satan. And as the 
universe is the dictate of His character, it would be 
sinful in Him not to have created it ; and it would be 
sinful not to have created it in that form or order in 
which His benevolence and love of virtue have brought 
it into being. " The Lord is righteous in all His ways, 
and holy in all His works." And though it would be 
irreverent to suppose Him sinful ; yet it would not be, 
to say, " All thy works are done in truth ; " and to 
argue, that a hand-breadth of departure in all the 
myriads of them since the universe began, would be 
aside from truth, and, therefore, opposite to His eternal 
obligation. 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

OF god's chief end. 

God's chief end in His own infinite existence is that 
in His own infinite existence which is the highest and' 
the best. That in His own infinite existence which is 



Chap. XXX VI.] Of God? s Chief End. 321 

the highest and the best, is His own infinite holiness. 
The infinite holiness of God is therefore His chief end 
in His own infinite existence. 

But if the infinite holiness of God is His chief end 
in His own infinite existence, then the display of His 
own infinite holiness is not the chief end ; and this we 
prove from four considerations : — 

First, if the display of His own infinite holiness be 
the chief end of the Almighty, it is either at the call of 
holiness or not : if it be not, then we have such a thing 
as the chief end of the Almighty unprompted by His 
holy character : if it be, then we have a chief end of 
the Almighty which is prompted by something else. 

Secondly, if the display of His own infinite holi- 
ness be the chief end of the Almighty, then we have 
the chief end of such a being as the Almighty termi- 
nating on the creature. 

Again, if the display of His own infinite holiness be 
the chief end of the Almighty, then the question may 
be asked, What is the chief end of that ? but no one 
can ask the question, What is the chief end of holiness ? 
seeing that it carries in itself its own infinite claim upon 
the mind. 

Lastly ; if the display of His own infinite holiness 
is the chief end of the Almighty, then He had no chief 
end in the ages that preceded the creation. 

Now we do not deny that the display of God's ho- 
liness is an important end ; for he says of Pharaoh, 
" For for this cause have I raised thee up, that I 
might shew in thee my power, and that my name 
might be declared in all the earth ; " but it is at the 
call of benevolence, and the love of virtue : and there- 
fore the ulterior end is the glory,* or supreme excel- 

* Kabhodh. 
14* 



122 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

lence itself; and not the glory in the other sense, i. e. 
the instrumental display which is so often spoken of as 
a high end in Scripture. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. 

of god's chief end in creation and providence. 

God's chief end in His own solitary existence would 
be that holiness which, in that case, would be a love of 
other beings that were yet to be, and a love of that 
holiness that would exist at any rate in His exalted 
character. The invisible things of Him before the 
foundation of the world would be all determined by 
benevolence and love of virtue. 

But when the universe began, His chief end would 
come more distinctly into notice. And His benevo- 
lence being, as we have seen, undiminished by His 
love of virtue, and His love of virtue untarnished by 
the upmost display of His benevolence, His universe 
would be the result of both. God's chief end, there- 
fore, in Creation and Providence, is His own infinite 
holiness ; and holiness demands the highest results of 
benevolence, and the highest diffusion of holiness, all 
over the worlds that He shall have brought into 
being. 

To give happiness, therefore, to the greatest num- 
ber of intelligent and immortal creatures, to raise it 
highest, to keep it longest, and to occasion it to grow 
with the highest conceivable celerity ; to diffuse holi- 
ness all over His works, and to make it the highest pos- 
sible in all periods of time, — that is what is dictated by 
benevolence and love of virtue ; and these being the 
divisions of His holiness, are that in which He consults 
it to the very highest degree. 



Chap. XXXVIII.] Of Optimism, 323 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

OF OPTIMISM. 

God, therefore, is either incapable or weak, or that 
which He aims after with the highest desire is that 
which He attains in the very highest degree. Holi- 
ness is something that He does not value more than 
anything else ; or else there is something weak or im- 
perfect in His nature ; or else there is something in 
His own holiness which impedes the holiness of others ; 
or else He uprears the holiness of others to the very 
highest possible degree. And happiness, is either im- 
paired by holiness ; or man's happiness is inconsistent 
with the happiness of God ; or God's happiness makes 
Him indifferent to the happiness of man ; or else the 
happiness of the universe will be extended to the ut- 
most possible extent. 

We are not afraid, therefore, of being accused of op- 
timism, if optimism were only these extreme ideas, — 
that God's universe is the happiest possible, and that 
God's universe is the holiest possible, making the holi- 
est possible that (as the superior in its excellence) in 
which the beltistic reality most gloriously consists. 
We have no fear to enlarge upon these points, and 
most thoughtfully to affirm them, that God could not 
have made a better, — that he could not have made a 
holier, and that He could not have made a happier; 
and that this universe is the most complete, not only 
as possible with God, but as conceivable in the very 
nature of affairs. 

But when the optimist comes in and teaches, that 
all virtue consists in benevolence, or that all virtue con- 
sists in utility, and so builds up a universe, the best 



324 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. II. 

only because it is the happiest, making the beltistic 
property to consist in its ability to make its inhabitants 
enjoy life, then we demur, — not because of an inferior 
beltistic conviction, but of a better, and because our 
optimism, though establishing a maximum felicity, has 
piled up above that a holiness that is superior to all. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

OF OBJECTIONS TO GOD'S NOT BEING ABLE TO CREATE A BETTER 
UNIVERSE FOUNDED UPON HIS OMNIPOTENCE. 

But then it may be argued, If God is not able to 
create a better universe, then we have an argument 
that throws us all into confusion at once, founded upon 
God's omnipotence. Let the beltistic property be what 
we please ; yet if it be finite ; if it be a finite holiness, 
and a finite happiness ; or a finite excellence in which 
holiness and happiness are blended, or in which one is 
the superior, but both the extremest possible ; then, 
when that property is reached, God's mightiness is 
brought to a pause. The little increment beyond 
is as impossible as the creation of Divinity. And 
God is limited ; that is, the infinitesimal fraction 
of a line cannot be passed, when what is called 
the highest possible condition has been reached 
in a finite creation. Now, to all this we answer, God 
is limited. It may be said, He could throw out other 
worlds, and create, this very morning, higher and holier 
abodes than He has ever brought into being. Sup- 
pose it done. Then, of course, He can create others. 
And suppose it done. Then of course there can be 
multitudes of others. And when the last sentence had 
been uttered, announcing the possibility of constella- 
tions happier than the rest, some one could take his 



Chap. XL.] Objections, from the Existence of Evil. 325 

stand and say, He could create a thousand more. 
Now of two things one ; — either God could not if He 
desired create the noblest possible universe, or, if He 
did, it must still be finite. There is no limit to the talk 
of casting out other worlds; and yet there must be 
some limit to the execution. If God desired ever so 
much to make the holiest possible universe, it must 
still be finite ; and that is all that can be asserted of 
the universe that His hand has made. 

Now, I know, that it is hard to imagine what that 
could be that could make Him stop, if He really de- 
sired to go on and on to the very acme ; but this we 
know, that He must somewhere stop ; and, after crea- 
ting a universe that is nameless in extent, He must 
somewhere set a horizon to His work, and must some- 
where stop short of its being as immense as His 
Divinity. 

Now, if this be the case, where is the unreasonable- 
ness of taking advantage of it in our belief? And as, 
if God did wish to make the holiest possible creation, 
He must still stop somewhere for its boundary, where 
is the sin of thinking that He has chosen the wisest 
and the best ? and though He still means immeasurably 
to expand its excellence, yet He pauses at each bestowal 
that He makes, out of the necessities of its finite 
nature ? 

CHAPTER XL. 

OF OBJECTIONS TO GOD'S NOT BEING ABLE TO CREATE A BETTER 
UNIVERSE FOUNDED UPON THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL. 

But it may be asked, How does this agree with the 
existence of evil ? Could not God create a universe as 
holy and as happy as the best, and yet leave out of" it 
those parts that are beset with evil ? And is it possi- 



326 EtRics. [b. iv. pt. hi. d. ii. 

ble that God is limited in such a sense that He cannot 
work out the highest purposes of good without admix- 
ture of eternal evil ? 

Now, we dare not talk of these things without talk- 
ing in the clearest and most intelligible way. When 
we say that God is limited, we mean that He is limited 
in a way that all will admit, — in the- power to make 
creatures ##limited, or to raise a nation to an equality 
or likeness to Himself. If, therefore, it were His wish 
to make all sentient and intelligent existence the high- 
est and happiest that He could, there must be a pause, 
from this very confessed and necessary imperfectness. 
He could raise a universe so high, and no higher. For 
if any one should take His stand and say, ' He could, a 
little higher,' this sort of speech might be perpetual. 
There is evidently a point at every stage of what is 
finite, where Omnipotence must pause, out of the very 
necessities of its * finite nature. 

Now if it be the will of the Almighty to make this 
the best possible universe, He would set that point the 
highest possible at each stage of His duration. What- 
ever circumstances would do this, those circumstances 
He would embrace. And if evil were such a circum- 
stance, the very holiness of God's character, which 
binds Him to the best possible creation, would lead 
Him to the existence of evil ; and, therefore, eternal 
truth, which is that which His holiness obeys, would 
sanction the employment of a power thus known to 
be for the advancement of the universe. 

Now, in respect to evil as a means of benefit, we 
utter two truths, We challenge any one to doubt 
them : — 

First, it may be the fact that evil is a circumstance 
* That is, the creation's (1875). 



Chap. XLL] Of Man's Chief End. 327 

in the arrangement of the universe, connected with the 
highest good ; and, 

Secondly, there is much to convince us in the 
arrangements of the universe that such is the fact. 

Natural evil would give us no difficulty. Moral 
evil, which absolutely requires the other, is the sum of 
the objection. And now let any one ask, how much 
of the glories of Providence is connected with the ex- 
istence of evil, and he will be staggered, at least, with 
the idea, that it may be necessary to the design that 
has been made. 

CHATER XLI. 

OF man's chief end. 

God's chief end being His own infinite holiness, 
man's chief end can be neither higher nor lower. It 
cannot be higher ; because that which is highest to 
God must be highest also to the creature. And it 
cannot be lower ; because that which is highest in 
itself, if discerned, must be highest to all that discern 
it. Man's chief end, therefore, is the holiness of 
God. 

But, as the holiness of God is not an object actively 
to pursue, except by desiring it, or praying for it, which 
seems to be our duty, man's chief end of a more prac- 
tical kind is the holiness of others. If any man say, 
No ; man's iron obligation is to be holy himself, — I 
answer, That is the very question. The very question 
is, What is man's highest holiness ? If any one say, 
Man's highest holiness is man's highest holiness, I 
agree, but doubt the progress of such a proposition. 
Man's highest holiness, next to the holiness of God, is 
to promote the holiness of the world around him. 



328 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. 11. 

CHAPTER XLII. 

OF THE PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING SYSTEM. 

I. A system that makes all virtue an indefinable 
quality, must shorten debate, because it precludes the 
questions on the nature of virtue. 

II. A system that makes all virtue belong to two 
definite affections, must assist our theology, because 
theology, though the science of God, is the science of 
God chiefly in His moral relations. 

III. A system that makes all virtue belong to two 
definite affections, must assist us in duty, for duty is 
the creature of light, and light could hardly be shed 
more expressly upon the boundaries of obligation. 

IV. A system that makes all virtue belong to benev- 
olence and a love of virtue, must be a basis for happi- 
ness, because it shows that this universe is not a failure, 
but is the noblest possible that even God could have 
prepared. 

V. A system that makes all virtue belong to benev- 
olence and a love of virtue, should aid us in worship, 
because it makes God not a mysterious Sovereign, but 
a glorious Creator, managing the best for the lands that 
he has made. 

VI. A system that makes all sin, want of benevo- 
lence and want of love to the virtuous principle, must 
aid us in piety, because it simplifies our penitence, and 
shows us but two evils that it is needful to restrain. 

VII. A system that makes this universe the best 
possible universe, must include the existence of evil, 
and take away the appearance of arbitrariness of what 
we are accustomed to contemplate as the naked sov- 
ereignty of God. 



Chap. I J Virtue a Quality of Emotions, 329 



DIVISION III. 

THE MORAL CHARACTER. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE MORAL QUALITY A QUALITY ONLY OF SINGLE FEELINGS. 

The first Division being on the subject of the Moral 
Quality, and the second, on the subject of the Moral 
Duties or those things in which the quality is found, it 
follows that we have gone no further than the consid- 
eration of single feelings ; for benevolence and love of 
virtue being our only duties, we have only to remember 
that benevolence and love of virtue are transitory feel- 
ings, to see that transitory feelings are all the length 
we have yet gone in the phenomena of the mind. 

Now, the question arises, Do these transitory feel- 
ings come up in any order as to their goodness or their 
badness? or is there an entire uncertainty? Can I 
only say, This feeling is a good feeling, and this feeling 
is a bad feeling ? or can I also say, This man is likely 
to feel what is right, and this man is accustomed to 
feel what is wrong? Can I only pronounce upon feel- 
ings when I see them ? or can I also say what feelings 
they are likely to be ? for if the first of these state- 
ments is the fact, we have finished our work ; but if the 
second, we have another entire department, and that 
department is the department of Character. 



33° Ethics. [B. iv. Pt. III. D. in. 



CHAPTER II. 



OF CHARACTER. 



Character (xapcucrqp ) is derived from the Greek 
word zap™™, which means to cut or engrave. 

I. Character, therefore, in its first sense, meant a 
cut or engraving, such as was used for a hieroglyph or 
letter. And letters under the name of characters are 
spoken of up to the present day. 

II. Characters, however, being made in a particular 
way, and every man's characters having something 
peculiar in them to mark them as his own, a man's 
character came to mean the letter he was accustomed 
to form, or, more comprehensively speaking, his hand- 
writing. 

III. This, which was only used by the Greeks and 
Romans, gave place in a later period of the world to 
another meaning ; for a man's writing being seen to 
resemble conduct (that is, as he fell into one, so he 
was found to fall into the other), a man's character 
came to mean the conduct that he shewed, or his 
prevalent behavior. 

IV. This, being supposed to arise within him, gave 
the name of character to nature or inward disposition 
of heart : 

V. And, afterward, to the man himself, as possessed 
of such a nature : in which case we say a man is a 
shocking character. 

VI. Finally, it came to mean character as ascribed 
or imputed to a man, and which might be ascribed or 
imputed to him justly or unjustly ; in which sense a 
man might be said to be better than his character. 

Now of all these senses, the third is the more phil- 



Chap. III.] God and Character. 331 

osophical, but the fourth is perhaps the common one. 
We need not, however, be particular. Our work, as it 
proceeds, will sufficiently distinguish our own immedi- 
ate meaning. 

CHAPTER III. 

OF CHARACTER IN ITS CONNECTION WITH GOD. 

God being Creator only in such a sense as to give 
being to an object for the instant while He is engaged 
in creating it, it follows that Providence is a new crea- 
tion every moment. Accordingly, a horse might be 
one moment a horse, and the next might be nothing. 
In the nature of finite things it is better that it should 
continue a horse ; but this is only the reason. The 
efficient cause of its continuing so, is solely the will of 
God. It might be one moment a horse, and the next 
moment a wall, and the next moment a college. Its 
continuing a horse is solely because God considers it 
better to create it the same ; although, if He had 
created it an elephant, it would be as simple to create 
as though He had created it just continuously a horse. 

Now, in respect to mind, the continuance is no dif- 
ferent from the continuance of matter. It might be 
one moment mind, and the next moment it might be 
created a vapor. It has in it only at the time what 
God puts into it by the act of creation. And as the 
rules and the reasons of its being are no part of that 
which God puts into it at its creation, it may be said 
that what He put into it yesterday has passed away, 
and that it is. a different creation at each act of His 
continuing of it in its being.* Now, if it be a new 

* We ought to have had some reserves for ignorance. We do not 
know all that God might create. We should not be too positive. But, 
from the Law of Parcimony, we have no reason to posit atoms ; and, 
therefore, the //Mihood at least, or what we have traced as the empirical 
probability, is that each creature is continuously brought into being (1875) « 



33 2 Ethics. [B. IV. Pt. III. D. ill. 

creation by each act of God by which He continues it 
in its being, then it is evident that it might be man or 
devil according to His will. There is nothing in the 
arm of God to forbid Him to make a new creature just 
what He may please. And if the upholding of a spirit 
is a new creation, there is nothing in the universe of 
God that would make the new being like the old, 
except the mere good pleasure of a will that has to 
select its pattern as though no old one had ever been 
created. 

Now, if the new mind and the old mind might have 
been entirely different, it is evident that they might 
have been different morally. Yesterday, I might be a 
saint ; to-day, I might be a sinner. If God new-creates 
my whole existence, surely He new-creates my charac- 
ter. And it is just as impossible to believe that He 
must make me all new because what He made me yes- 
terday perished at the moment He was making it, and 
yet that he must not make my character, as it would 
be to believe that He must make a star all over again 
every moment, and yet not make the greenish or the 
yellow light that twinkles from it in its passage through 
the heavens. 

What we teach, therefore, is, that character, as a 
thing to-day, is revived by the Almighty from the 
character yesterday. He gave me my character this 
morning when I waked. And this He does, not arbi- 
trarily, but under the direction of reasons. 

There are, therefore, two things, the power and 
the eternal reasons. The power'we have found to be 
from God. We are to consider next the reasons that 
direct it. 

Our next subject therefore is the reasons of God 
in the direction of character. 



Chap. IV.] Character and Happiness. 333 



. CHAPTER IV. 

OF CHARACTER IN ITS CONNECTION WITH HAPPINESS. 

It has been remarked upon as an interesting fact, 
that God takes care of a man in the exercise of virtue ; 
that is, that as virtues are a disinterested exercise, God 
takes care of our happiness. Now this statement is 
not adequately profound. 

God does not make benevolence and love of virtue 
a source of happiness by arranging our nature so as 
to make us happy in the exercise of these affections ; 
but (what will be instantly perceived) these virtues 
are happinesses themselves. God could not make vir- 
tue any different. And virtue belonging to benevo- 
lence and the love of excellence, it will be seen that 
virtue belongs to two pleasures ; for pleasure at holi- 
ness and pleasure at others' welfare are the only things 
that are actually virtuous. 

It is not profound, therefore, to say, that God 
arranges our being so as to make virtuousness happy ; 
for virtuousness belongs to happiness; happiness at 
the welfare of others and happiness at the excellence 
of virtue being the only possible forms in which God 
even is a possessor of excellence. 

These pleasures also are the highest. There are 
none which have more to do with heavenly felicity. 
It is a truth, therefore, that happiness is holiness * in 
the highest forms in which the idea of happiness can 
possibly exist. 

* By holiness, of course, is here meant, that which possesses holiness, 
or holiness in its second meaning. By happiness is meant, those two 
forms of happiness which a man feels at virtue and the welfare of 



334 Ethics. [b. iv. pt. hi. d. hi. 

But though being happy in the two highest possible 
forms in which happiness ever exists, is the only pos- 
sible form of the possession of virtue, yet happiness, 
notwithstanding that, is a high inducement to virtue 
itself. I am made more virtuous because happiness is 
virtue. And not only in the nature of things does 
happiness, where it is itself a virtue, serve as an induce- 
ment to virtue itself, but God uses other happinesses. 
He not only elicits virtue by help of the happiness of 
holiness itself, but also by superintending other happi- 
nesses ; that is, by a system of rewards that is made as 
general as Providence itself. 

CHAPTER V. 

OF REWARDS. 

Now, these rewards need only be described by say- 
ing, that happiness has an intrinsic tendency to be an 
inducement for virtue. No man will have a doubt of 
this. Happiness may have an intrinsic tendency as an 
inducement to wickedness, in those cases, for example, 
where chastisement is better. But happiness offered 
to the innocent, and having an influence not only upon 

others. The proposition less briefly stated is, that two of our highest 
happinesses are our only virtues. 

This shows what those ethical philosophers were in search of who 
were betrayed into the very erroneous doctrine, that " virtue was only 
the highest form of seeking our own happiness ; " a proposition that 
would be entirely true if rectified in two ways, first, by taking virtue in 
its meaning as that which possesses virtue, or as virtuous affection, and 
second, by striking out the idea of " seeking." Virtuous affection is no 
doubt the highest form of personal happiness (1855). 

We have already shown, however (Pathics, Introd.), that happiness, 
in the instance of holiness, is good distinctly from its being happy ; that 
is, possesses an ethical excellence which is a consciousness in the happi- 
ness itself \j875). 



Chap. VI.] Summary of the Preceding. 335 

them but upon the public that witness it, must be an 
encouragement to virtue ; otherwise, where is the 
principle of reward? Without being particular, there- 
fore ; — happiness, as a gift to the innocent, is a high 
inducement to character. 

But now, happiness largely consists in holiness. 
Not only are the two holy affections the highest 
possible happiness ; but happiness, as we have just 
been declaring, is accorded to holiness. For God to 
keep a character holy therefore, is the highest possible 
reward. 

We see, hence, one great reason for character. My 
being holy to-day is the chief of my recompense for 
holiness yesterday. And so, holiness is made to con- 
tinue. I retire to my bed with no hold upon charac- 
ter but as a reward of the Almighty.* 

CHAPTER VI. 

SUMMARY OF THE PRECEDING. 

It becomes us, however, to make all these things 
somewhat more distinct. 

I. Affection, in each separate case, is comparatively 
simple. It glows in the mind, and passes off and has 
ended forever. 

II. The question is, whether, ending forever, it 
leaves behind it no influence, or no ground for know- 
ing whether the affection that comes after will be vir- 
tuous or sinful; or whether the hundreds that come 
after it will be all tinged with a prevailing quality. 

III. This we have answered by saying, that all that 
comes after it is with God. He only can decide, for 

* Man, however, has really no holiness, and no proper reward. The 
reward that he meets with, is really the reward of the Redeemer. 



336 Ethics. [b. iv. Pt. hi. d. hi. 

He only sustains our existence. If, therefore, the exist- 
ence of the future borrows anything from the existence 
of the past, it is God that carries it over, and, therefore, 
it is God preeminently that is the connecter of char- 
acter. 

IV. Yet God's having the power, does not prevent 
His acting under the authority of reasons. On the 
contrary He has the strictest reasons for the bestow- 
ment of character ; and these reasons are chiefly* the 
need of reward. 

V. Reward is all forms of happinesses, used in their 
influence to encourage virtue. Virtue being a happi- 
ness itself, and, moreover, being the thing that calls for 
a reward, it becomes therefore, immediately and medi- 
ately a reward itself. The continuance of virtue is, 
therefore, that it may serve as a reward. 

Now in saying this we mean to say, that this is all 
the principle on which reward is based. Righteous- 
ness does not deserve a reward in any sense of imme- 
diate connection. But it deserves a reward in a round- 
about way, and that roundabout path is this : — First, 
happiness, in the nature of things, is an eternal incen- 
tive to virtue. Here lies the principle of reward in 
the nature of things.f Second ; being an eternal incen- 
tive, God must notice it, and use it as such. Third ; 
if He use it at all, He must use it accurately. God, 
therefore, having a high affection for holiness, will 

* I mean reasons for the discriminations of character. The bestow- 
ment of good character, other things being equal, is a main governmen- 
tal desire of the Almighty (1875). 

f For a man to say that we see by conscience directly that virtue 
deserves a reward, as though desert were a simple and separate idea, or 
even part of the idea of virtue, is simply absurd. We see that virtue 
deserves a reward in no other sense than gangrene requires a knife, or 
drought requires rain. 



Chap. VI.] Summary of the Preceding, 337 

reward its possessor from the intrinsic nature of reward 
to be an incentive to holiness. 

But it will be asked, How can three things agree ? 
I. God is the Creator of character, that is, restores it 
again from night to morning. II. Reward is a pro- 
moter of character ; and III. Character is itself a 
reward. Now here seems a harmful jumble, that keeps 
anything clear from being appreciated. So let us treat 
these matters very plainly. 

God is the Preserver of character, and yet helps it 
by rewards, in just as plain a sense as God is the im- 
prover of character, and yet advances it by the gospel. 
Where had I my character this morning when I slept ? 
Certainly where I had my being. And if God is 
charged with one just as much as He is charged with 
the other, certainly the fact of His agency cannot be 
one moment denied. But power is one thing, and in- 
struments another. Without instruments I cannot 
have any benevolence at all. Unless God shows me 
virtue, I cannot have any love of it. And, therefore, 
the sight of the truth is necessary to the exercise of 
character, even though the whole of the power should 
come entirely from God. 

Now take reward in, in the horizon of truth, and 
we have but another instrument. I cannot love others 
unless I see them ; and it seems I cannot love others 
as much, as if I am rewarded for it. Both then are 
instruments. 

Now, that character itself should become a reward 
for character, is not so unnatural, seeing it is the near- 
est to us. That fishing itself should become a reward 
for fishing, is not so unnatural, seeing that it gives me 
pleasure. I open my eyes and see virtue all bathed in 
happiness. I take in, therefore, two sights ; the ex- 

!5 



358 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. in. 

cellence of virtue, and the happiness with which it is 
attended. Both these apparitions help it; and not 
singularly : the happiness of virtue is the nearest pleas- 
ure at the time. 

CHAPTER VII. 

OF COVENANTED REWARDS. 

Now, it being possible to state all these things so 
clearly, we might fancy some measure of reward. 
Certain it is that reward must be perfectly accurate. 
Yet though the principles of it are so entirely simple, 
yet the statutes of it are entirely unknown. 

Indeed, we are troubled by dangerous exceptions. 
Satan, after obedience to .the right, was afterwards for- 
saken, and abandoned to the wrong. So was Adam. 
Adam's children never knew anything of right.* It 
would exhaust any man's intelligence, if he spent his 
life in laboring for a law that would comprehend the 
administrations of God. It was necessary, therefore, 
that He should reveal Himself; and, therefore, all the 
rewards of which we know anything very clearly, are 
covenanted rewards. 

All these are founded in nature ; and yet some of 
them are very peculiar. For example, God promised 
to Adam that he would bless all his race perpetually 
for his temporary and single obedience. This, in so 
artificial a connection as birth, of which Adam knew 
nothing, and which psychologically seems no connection 
at all, was a promise to millions for the labor of one ; 
and yet, quoad Adam,f it served all the uses of a 
reward. It was an inducement of the highest kind ; and 

* Of a perfect kind. 

f And so it should be treated. It was not our reward, but Adam's ; 
though the guilt, as a mere matter of philology, is both ours and his. 



Chap. IX . ] Of Pun ishment. 339 

moreover, a lesson to the universe that will last forever 
and forever. So Jesus Christ was promised the salva- 
tion of his people. We must not, however, dwell upon 
these things. The simplest rewards are those that 
were promised to Adam, and to the angels. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

OF MERIT. 

MERIT is only a convenient word for expressing all 
that we have been saying. It is the suitedness of a 
mind to be blessed with happiness according to those 
principles of inducement and encouragement which we 
have just been stating. A man merits either, when, in 
view of his own past character, the highest interests 
of holiness and happiness would be promoted by giv- 
ing him either. Christ merits the salvation of His peo- 
ple ; and so do we, in a modified use of that term, 
merit through Him our own deliverance. We shall 
return to these subjects. The difficulty of ourselves 
having been guilty, need give us no uneasiness ; for 
reward, though founded in nature, is only for the end 
of the highest inducement of virtue, 

CHAPTER IX. 

OF PUNISHMENT.* 

LOVE of others and love to the quality of virtue 
being the only virtues, of course a disposition to pun- 
ish must be an instance under one or both of them. 
It is an instance under both. Punishment, therefore, 
is not a virtue, original on the part of God, and the 
fruit of a primordial desire ; but an instrument. It is 
* With this caption written down, the old manuscript ceases (1875). 



34° Ethics. [b. IV. Px. III. D. III. 

not moral, any more than a plough or a flail. If any- 
one dreams that it is, consciously so, and that we think 
of its desert intuitively, and as of the very nature of 
sin, we have but to point him to the idea of distance. 
The two ideas are similar. Distance seems so evident 
when we look at a star, that it seems a consciousness, 
like the very light that twinkles. And yet it was long 
ago found to be the fact that distance was empirical. 
So of punishment : it is so fixed an instrument ; so 
bred in the very nature of things ; and has been used 
so long, and borne so often, — that it seems one with 
trespass. We hardly separate them. And yet, be- 
yond all manner of doubt, it is a mere instrument, 
demanded by nature, and which it would turn every- 
thing awry not to threaten and to employ. 

Punishment is of two kinds, suffering and sin. The 
former is what is usually conceived. But if suffering 
were the whole of punishment, there would be no 
hell ; * for sin is not an infinite evil such that if it were 
not punished by apostasy, a single sin would merit an 
eternity -of punishment. It pleases justice that sin 
should corrupt us ; that is, that it should defile our 
nature. That is a part of its punishment (Rom. i. 26). 
That is the serious part. I sin, and I am given up to 
sin. I sin more, and it becomes more. It grows. 
Sin, therefore, is a part of the punishment of sin. And 
it adds to suffering, because, first, it is a suffering in 
itself, and, second, it deserves more suffering; it is the 
great prolific centre from which the hell of the soul 
must emanate. 

One word more. Punishment is an instrument. 
Now an instrument for what ? If sin more and greater 
goes on as the punishment of sin, how can punishment 

* Prov. xix. 19. See Author's Commentary. 



Chap, x.] Covenanted Punishment. 341 

be an instrument for repressing sin and advancing holi- 
ness ? This it emphatically is. Not singly for the 
greatest happiness, but for the greatest good, moral 
and mental; and, as moral good can never interfere 
with happiness, then for both objects. Punishment 
we define as an instrument for increasing the holiness, 
and so the happiness, of the widest universe. 

Punishment employs sin. Punishment (for the 
widest part of it) consists in sin. Punishment entails 
sin ; and, for men and angels, makes it perpetual. 
But none the less on that account can we see that it is 
a moral engine. (1) To the few that escape, and (2) 
to the wide universe that were never implicated, it is 
the deepest teaching ; far deeper than reward ; far 
deeper than a simple suffering; opening the huge pro- 
portions of guilt ; stamping the hateful lineaments of 
sin ; and building a wider monument out of its infernal 
growth than could at all be reached by pain as penalty. 

CHAPTER X, 

OF COVENANTED PUNISHMENT. 

PUNISHMENT, therefore, not being as of an original 
taste, we are prepared to hear that, as an instrument, 
it can be shifted ; that is, where no oath is violated, 
and where the end can be maintained, some other 
punishment might be substituted than that which is 
straightforward to the sinner. 

1. Adam, for example, was punished twice ; once 
in himself, and once in his offspring. All men are pun- 
ished similarly. If I sin, it strikes other parties. But, 
in Adam's case, it had a plighted deflniteness. He 
lived under its shadows. He may not have known 
what offspring was, or understood all that was to follow. 



34 2 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. III. D. in. 

But he understood more than the one blighted life. 
He knew that he was under bonds for others. And, 
therefore, that breadth of penalty increased his caution 
about the Fall, and increased immeasurably the monu- 
mental testimony. 

2. The second Adam was a still different case. 
Here the punishment was not multiplied, but narrowed 
in. Here the penalty was shifted. Here the punish- 
ment was shown artificially to be an instrument, and 
the punishment of one was made to answer by covenant 
for many. Here the penalty was lifted off where it 
was shockingly deserved, and freighted down on Him 
who was entirely innocent. It is not vengeance, there- 
fore. It is not the greed of an original taste, or the 
fire of a self-justified anger. But it is a government 
expedient, sworn to by solemn oaths, and required by 
the very nature of our spirits, not to produce happiness 
alone, but to produce the widest holiness among all 
the creatures. 

CHAPTER XL 

OF VINDICATORY JUSTICE. 

PUNISHMENT having been carefully defined, our 
true policy is to lay justice side by side with that, and 
let them define each other. We shall do the same 
with guilt ; and we shall do the same with forgiveness 
and atonement. If punishment is a mere expedient, 
Vindicatory Justice is a form of words to tell that 
whole story. It is not a primordial trait. The two 
primordial traits are benevolence and the love of vir- 
tue ; and we have but to look at these to see how 
simple they are, compared with anything we can think 
of in the forms of justice. Given a creature, no matter 
what the form of its thinking or sentient life, and man 



Chap, xii.] Of Guilt. 343 

and God and devil are bound to love him. There is 
no exception. Given a right thought, no matter who 
has it, or what the form in which it may appear, and 
men and angels are bound to reverence it, and with 
no reserve of which we can conceive. 

But how different justice ! There are cases when 
it does not overtake the guilty. There are cases where 
it does overtake the innocent. There are cases where 
two parties have been guilty for the same offence. 
All these things have been illustrated in the sacrifice 
of Christ. The guilty have been glorified, and the. 
glorified have been made guilty ; and both have been 
followed by Vindicatory Justice according as the good 
of holiness has demanded this or that. Christ has 
been punished that the guilty might escape, and the 
guilty have ceased to be so by the mere award of a 
divinely accepted covenant. Vindicatory Justice was 
the appropriate term in each of these changes. Did 
it follow Christ, it was equally in place. And, there- 
fore, I say, that this alone puts vengeance just where 
it ought to stand. That vengeance upon Christ and 
vengeance upon the' lost are the one form of a primor- 
dial trait, is dangerous and absurd ; and, therefore, 
there is no such virtue. Vindicatory Justice is but a 
convenient speech of that story of God which tells of 
Him how He discourages iniquity. 

CHAPTER XII. 

OF GUILT. 

And so of Guilt. 

We are really most pronounced and most elaborate 
where we are most brief, and where we go to the mark 
in the very shortest period of time. Guilt is the con- 



344 Ethics. [b. IV. Pt. hi. d. hi. 

verse ot punishment. Tell me where anybody ought 
to be punished, and I will tell you where he is guilty. 
And even here that word ought, must be distinguished. 
It is used sometimes in the instance of desert. But 
tell me where a man ought to be punished for the 
advancement of holiness, and I will tell you where he 
is guilty. So Christ, He became an object of wrath. 
So Cain, in his unconscious infancy. So all the world, 
upon the sin of Adam. These were all innocent ; 
though innocent in different ways. And yet they were 
all guilty. And so guilt is a like term with wrath and 
vindicatory justice, variant in its case, and anything in 
the world but a primordial idea. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

OF ATONEMENT. 

Keeping close to the ideas thus defined, we get 
the best conception of the Lord's Atonement. It was 
a punishment. It was a punishment of the covenanted 
sort. It was a punishment in the shape of vengeance, — 
vengeance however never being primordial. It was at 
the call of Vindicatory Justice ; this, as best seen in 
Christ's case, being secondary, and never primary. 
It, therefore, implied guilt ; but showing more impera- 
tively on that very account that guilt was a whole 
bundle of speech, telling the whole story of punishment, 
and meaning that Christ could be punished for men 
with the same plighted results in the advancement of 
holiness. 



•Chap. XIV.J Of Forgiveness. 345 



CHAPTER XIV. 



OF FORGIVENESS. 



There are but two virtues, a love for the welfare 
of others, and a love for the quality of virtue. Neither 
of these must eventuate upon forgiveness. In the first 
place, not the first ; for we must love the welfare of 
others, even if we do not forgive them : and in the 
second place, not the second ; for we must not esteem 
others, even if we do forgive them, except as they 
become worthy of this species of love. 

There has been infinite error about this matter of 
forgiveness. 

When I forgive a man, I lift away punishment. 
When God forgives him, He does precisely the same 
thing. 

Let us keep among these words. They wonder- 
fully clarify each other. Guilt, — that is the correlative 
of forgiveness. 

When a man says, I hate him, and can't forgive him, 
and means by that, he wishes him evil, he has a mon- 
grel idea of the duty of forgiveness. So ought he never 
to have hated him. 

When a man says, I hate him, and can't esteem him, 
and mourn my hardness of heart that I cannot forgive, 
he is mistaken again. He ought not to forgive. At 
least he ought not to forgive in that sense in which he 
understands forgiveness. Men are tormented by these 
mistakes ; and alas ! die hard, because they cannot 
think well of their enemies. It was never intended. 
We are bound to wish well even to the devil. We 
are bound to think well only of the estimable. For- 
giveness lies in another beat. Even God forgives only 
IS* 



34-6 Ethics. [b. iv. Pt. hi. d. hi. 

upon an atonement ; and so it is with men. We pun- 
ish for morals' sake. We punish for defensive pur- 
poses. We punish as a remedial act. Now satisfy 
these ends, and it is time to forgive. When will men 
understand these facts ? The Bible says, — Upon an 
offence rebuke; upon repentance forgive (Lu. xvii. 3). 
We scatter all this to the winds. We have a notion 
that there must be a universal forgiveness. We get it 
all mixed. (1) We think we ought to forgive and 
cease resentment. We ought never to have begun 
resentment. (2) We think we ought to soften and 
think well of the base. We ought never to do it, what- 
ever their courteous amendment. (3) We think we 
ought to shake hands with them whether they apolo- 
gize or no. This whole thing is wonderfully mistaken. 
The Bible says, — " If thou bring thy gift to the altar, 
and there rememberest THAT THY BROTHER HATH 
AUGHT AGAINST THEE, leave there thy gift before the 
altar, and go thy way ; first be reconciled to thy bro- 
ther, and then come and offer thy gift " (Matt. v. 23, 24). 
This shows what I am to do when I am the trans- 
gressor. But now again, — " If THY BROTHER TRES- 
PASS AGAINST THEE," (Matt, xviii. 15). Here is some- 
thing that will shed its light upon the whole subject 
of forgiveness. There are to be conditions. I am 
never to need to forgive as ceasing to resent ; for I am 
never to feel resentment. But I am never to dare to 
forgive as ceasing to inflict, till there has been the 
proper remedy. Our Saviour insists upon this. When 
justice is committed to the state, I am to depend upon 
its adjudications ; but where it must be by private atti- 
tudes, I am instructed to a very hair. " If HE REPENT, 
forgive him." I suppose that means, that if he does not 
repent, we are not to forgive him. The direction is 



Chap. XV.J Of Justice. 347 

yet more explicit. " If he trespass against thee seven 
times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again 
to thee saying, I repent, thou shalt forgive him " 
(Luke xvii. 4). And then, when all remedies fail, we 
are distinctly instructed (and how different is this from 
our goody-good conceits), " Let HIM BE UNTO THEE 
AS A HEATHEN MAN AND A PUBLICAN " (Matt, xviii. 1 7). 
Like diatribes against hanging ; like extreme views 
about temperance ; like general-happiness schemes, — 
these softly notions about injuries breed injuries, as 
one might naturally expect. A Puritan mistake about 
offences breeds a Congress that can give the lie with 
no troublesome results. It breeds a manhood that can 
take an insult, and shake the hand that may adminis- 
ter it ; that admires a Christian who can smile forgiv- 
ingly under an affront ; that can manage schools of 
learning by random imputations of deceit, when the 
scholar is nearly grown ; that can bring Billingsgate up 
into the higher markets of exchange ; and that can 
make it appear as of the teaching of Christ, to take 
lovingly, and with relations afterward, an unatoned 
assault upon honesty and honor. 

CHAPTER XV. 

OF JUSTICE. 

THOUSANDS of persons will be sure that orthodoxy 
is put in peril, and will see no basis for the central 
doctrines of the cross, if justice is made not primordial, 
and is denied a place as an original attribute of God. 
Justice, of all moral traits, seems to demand a position 
at the side of mercy, and to claim to be first consid- 
ered if there is to be any priority the one over the 
other. 



34^ Ethics. [B. iv. Pt. III. D. ill. 

But by all the rules of philosophy, to say nothing 
of Scripture, how can that be a primordial trait that 
refuses unity ? We defy any one to tell us what jus- 
tice is by a word. Benevolence is a perfect expression. 
It tells the story of an original virtue thoroughly and 
once for all. There is no vestige of an exception. I 
am to love my enemies. I am to love the wicked. In 
the sense of bene-volens I am to wish well to the devil, 
and have a pity for him, for so has the Almighty. I 
am down at the hard-pan of the absolute, just as with 
that other virtue. For God and man and devil and 
angel and all intelligences have two moralities with 
which there is no varying, — a love of others, which con- 
sists in desiring their welfare, and a love of virtue, vir- 
the being a simple quality, and a love to it being of so 
plain a kind that an exception can no more occur than 
in the duty of God to keep Himself from palpable 
iniquity. 

But how is it with justice? It begins to drop its 
meanings as a balloon parts with ballast. We get 
down to a forensic sense after endless distinctions. 
Honesty and things like that are crowded into it. 
And when we say, We will treat of rectoral justice, our 
difficulties have scarcely begun. Let any man declare 
a law of rectoral justice. Let him so much as declare 
a fragment of one. We defy him to attempt it. Sup- 
pose he says, The innocent may not suffer like the 
wicked. That is not so. Animals suffer. Some poor 
brutes are bred deformed, and do nothing but suffer to 
their dying day. Suppose another enouncement. 
Suppose he says, The wicked must suffer. That is not 
so. Vast multitudes of the wicked are to be gloriously 
lifted. Where shall justice appear ? Are the righteous 
to be rewarded ? Satan was righteous. Is every good 



Chap. XVI.] Of Righteousness. 349 

work to be blessed ? Adam had good works. It 
would puzzle any one to see where a line could be 
drawn that would take in justice in that well bounded 
way that marks all ideas that are truly primaries. 

But when we resort to the two sole virtues, benev- 
olence and the love of virtuousness, we can argue out 
from there with the utmost clearness. Justice becomes 
a bundle ; a sort of huge store-house of proprieties and 
sequences under these. Punishment becomes an in- 
strument ; vindicatory justice, the norm that wields 
it ; reward, the encouragement for virtue : covenant, 
the pre-promised scheme for making all recompenses 
more efficient ; justice, therefore, not an unnatural 
trait; not one not based in the origin of things; not 
one not fortified by promise ; not one not seated like 
the primaries from which it is derived ; but not one 
itself primary, but, contrariwise, deriving from those 
that are ; and on that very account hard to be defined, 
and bundled loosely like all other derivative ideas. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

INCIDENT to the derived nature of justice, is the 
looseness of all these attendant conceptions. Guilt 
coming as the counterpart of punishment, we might 
suppose that righteousness might fix its meaning as 
the opposite of guilt. But try that on an example. 
The guilty are certain to be punished ; but are the 
righteous certain to be rewarded ? No one can write 
a sentence or begin a paragraph on the general subject 
of righteousness without coming to the utmost diffi- 
culty. Disembarrassed of all equivocals, and not noti- 
cing that righteousness means holiness or goodness of 



350 Ethics. [b. iv. Pt. til d. hi. 

heart ; confining ourselves to what is strictly forensic, — 
who understands even that ? and will come aboard 
and sail our craft through three leagues of sea without 
discomfiture? What is righteousness? Is it a merit 
that secures reward ? Then what characterizes it ? 
Give us a case of it in some noted instance. Is Gabriel 
righteous? Then how about Satan? Satan, exactly 
like Gabriel, up to a certain mark of time, deserved 
well of the Almighty. What is righteousness? Is it 
righteousness beyond a mark of time ? Then it is not 
primary. What was the righteousness of Adam ? 
Was it righteousness if it lasted a certain age ? And 
what fixed that age ? After all, is there any righteous- 
ness ? Is it not a thing of covenant ? And if it be so, 
that explains our Saviour, — After we have done all 
" we are unprofitable servants" (Lu. xvii. io): and that 
explains Ezekiel, — " His righteousness which he hath 
done shall not be remembered/' etc., etc., (Ez. ih\20): 
and that enforces our facts, — that justice is no primary 
trait ; for it is impossible to build difficulties like this 
around benevolence and the love of virtuousness. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

OF DESERT. 

RIGHTEOUSNESS being a merit of reward, and guilt 
an obligation to be punished, it might be supposed that 
desert corresponded to each of these, and it does 
correspond, perhaps, in the instance of reward. I do 
not deserve reward, unless I am entitled to it ; and it 
appears I am not entitled to it, unless it is given me 
by covenant. I only deserve, therefore, covenanted 
rewards. It is different with punishment. I deserve 
punishment often when I am not guilty. My guilt may 



Chap. XVII.] Of Desert. 351 

have been removed by the Gospel, but not my ill- 
desert. 

And, again ; Christ may be guilty; and, indeed, an 
infant may be guilty ; and, in a certain sense, the un- 
born world may be guilty, — but not ill-deserving. 

These things are the mere usage of language. 

Nevertheless this word desert has played an impor- 
tant part in arguments about the nature of justice. 

It has been said, I am conscious of ill-desert. 

Now, if there be no such thing as ill-desert, except 
as a convenient expression for saying that there is a 
certain use for punishment, and that I am a sinner, it 
is evident that this argument from consciousness is 
altogether beyond the facts. I am conscious of sin. 
I am conscious of its filth and shame. I am conscious 
of its pestiferousness as an evil. If that be ill-desert, 
then I have a sense of it. But that it deserves punish- 
ment as a thing consciously revealed, is about as true 
as that I am conscious of the distance of a house. I 
am conscious of the color of a house, just as I am of the 
odiousness of my sin ; but that it requires force to build 
it, or that it requires bricks to go into its wall, I am not 
conscious ; any more than I am conscious of desert, 
though I am conscious of the infamy of sin, and 
see men naturally benefited by pain and penalty. 

Desert, therefore, like guilt, is an expression for 
describing the suitedness of recompense : only, unlike 
guilt, it sticks to the broader features of suitedness ; 
while guilt, straying into theological speech, goes into 
all the niceties of award, where covenant and astound- 
ing grace transcend the bourne of any usual adminis- 
tration. 



BOOK V. 

THEOLOGY; 



OR, THE 



SCIENCE OF PERCEPTION AS KNOWLEDGE 
OF THE BEING OF A GOD. 



CHAPTER I. 

THEOLOGY UNDER THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY. 

If there is nothing consciously in the mind but 
perception, God is perception, or He is not consciously 
in the mind. 

We should like to see a professorship established in 
some great university, on Rudimental Thought as 
hinted at by Rudimental Language. We never hear 
of a man being conscious of himself, or of his being 
conscious of his own soul. We never hear of his being 
conscious of a rock, or of a tree. We never hear of 
his being conscious of God. We hear of his being 
conscious of pain, and conscious of sin, and conscious 
of joy, and perhaps conscious of the love of God in his 
own heart ; but it makes us feel strong in our philosophy 
to remember, that we can be loyal to the most delicate 
hints of established idiom. If any one hears of being 
conscious of a peach, or conscious of the me, or of the 
spirit, it shall be in the writings of some philosopher 
who is placing himself in the wrong by unusual lan- 
guage. 

We hear of the sun rising ; but, then, justifiably ; 



354 Theology [Book V. 

for the sun does rise. Relatively, that is just the very 
appearance. And so we hear of a pain in the fingers ; 
for that is the sensation; but when the fingers are cut 
off, and the pain keeps where it was, that does not 
falsify the fact. The language speaks the conscious 
seeming ; and thus it becomes our appeal as to the 
conscious seeming among men when we say that it 
does not speak of our being conscious of our souls, or 
conscious of that loftier Soul, the Spirit that is declared 
invisible. 

CHAPTER II. 

THEOLOGY UNDER THE LIGHT OF LOGIC. 

If there is nothing intuitively known but percep- 
tion, God is perception, or He is not intuitively 
known. 

As God is not perception, and, therefore, not intui- 
tively known, and as nothing is certain but what is 
intuitively known, it is not certain that there is any such 
being as God. 

This reasoning we admit. 

1. But then we insist upon a technical sense of 
certainty. 

If nothing is certain but what is intuitively known, 
certainty must be confined to what is so ex se. Con- 
sciousness is consciousness. To deny the truth of 
consciousness, is to deny that we are conscious. There 
is nothing else that is certain in a similar way. Now 
unless we are conscious of God, He falls short of 
original certainty. 

2. And why should we repine at this ? because the 
most pious men are engaged in provifig that there is 
such a being as the Almighty. Do they ever prove 
that there is such a thing as their being conscious? 



Chap. III.] under the Light of Ontology. 355 

3. The Bible speaks of " faith." Why not say- 
certainty ? It uses a word (ttigtevo)) meaning trust or 
confidence. It applies this very word to our theosophy. 
It does indeed speak of our knowing God (1 Cor. xv. 
34) ; but it is referring there to certain conscious qual- 
ities ; as when I say, I am conscious of the goodness 
of my neighbor. In the great matter of the divine 
existence it says, " Ye believe in God " (Jo. xiv. 1) ; 
" Thou believest that there is one God" (Ja. ii. 19) ; 
or again, " By faith we understand that the worlds 
were framed by the word of God " (Heb. xi. 3). 

4. Nor is there any hardship in this. The A B 
C of all knowledge is intuitive. Nothing else is. The 
City of London is an empirical percept. So is self.* 
So is the existence of every creature. If God can 
condemn me at the last as having had a like facility for 
discovering Him as for discovering my own existence, 
the lack of certainty of the conscious sort will not 
defraud Him of the right to punish me. 

Beyond all question, however, there is nothing con- 
scious but consciousness ; and unless God is conscious- 
ness, I do not intuitively know any such existence. 

CHAPTER III. 

THEOLOGY UNDER THE LIGHT OF ONTOLOGY. 

BEING is either Self or Not-Self. God is not Self: 
therefore He belongs to the great class of Not-Self. 
The class of Not-Self, more easily than the unit Self, 
is seen to be empirically discovered. 

But the class of Not-Self, as well as the unit Self, 
with children, and with all peasant-men, and, therefore, 
with all men, for all men are partial children, never 

* So far as it does not embrace consciousness (see Ontology). 



356 Theology. [Book V. 

divorce themselves from qualifying consciousness. 
Self is conscious self; and not-self is the red cherry, or 
the gray rock, or the High God ; in which the redness 
or the height is not put apart, but is put in consciously. 
Let abstraction be complete, and let self and rock and 
the Almighty be thought of emptily, and they are all 
alike in Logic. They are inferred empirically. They 
subsist invisibly. They are known by likeness. And 
that likeness is not (i) Direct (B. II. Chap. X.) ; nei- 
ther is it even (2) Partial ; but it is of that (3) Inter- 
mediate sort, like x, y, z, in a lengthened arguing. 

There is nothing intuitively known but perception. 
God is certainly unlike any perception. But we 
trusted ourselves to things that were like ; and from 
those to other things ; and from those to other 
things ; each last thing, like the one before it ; till, at 
last, the discrepance was so great, that the first like- 
ness faded out ; but we were carried by a bridge of 
analogies to results that were singularly different. 

CHAPTER IV. 

GOD AS LIKE OTHER BEINGS. 

THERE is nothing consciously in the mind but per- 
ception. There is nothing intuitively known but 
consciousness. God, therefore, being not conscious- 
ness, is not intuitively known. But being invisible, 
as substance is, and as man is, and as the universe 
is, and, indeed, as I myself am, considered apart from 
qualities, His history genetically, that is, the genesis of 
the Idea, — is ontologically like all His creatures. 

Here then is vast resemblance. 

Hence (1) the teleological argument. 

Precisely as I trace cause, so I trace the First Cause. 



Chap. IV.] God as like Other Beings. 357 

Hence (2) the nature of the teleological argument, 

It is not, — I see works in man, and, therefore, I 
infer works in the Great Jehovah. The argument is 
the same for each. We neither see man nor the Al- 
mighty. We begin with consciousness. The beauty 
of Metaphysics is, that it deals with that which we in- 
tuitively know. I have neither seen God nor my neigh- 
bor. But beginning with that which I have seen, viz. 
my perceptions, I see two growing orders ; and, in an 
inevitable way (immediate to a childish mind, and dis- 
tant to one more abstract), I trace analogies. And 
whatever God is, man is. That is, I see neither in 
himself, but both as the result of an ontological expe- 
rience. 

3. Hence also the consequences of the teleological 
argument. 

Man seems to be moving about. God is hidden. 
How mad I shall appear in saying, Both are similar ! 
But when I come to weigh, it is clothes that are mov- 
ing about, or at least flesh or body. It is certain ap- 
pearances of sense. I grant you we come to man first, 
and reach him earliest in the train of analogy. But 
what do we really reach ? We reach his works. We 
reach certain appearances in our inward consciousness. 
We see man mostly in ourselves. And hence, in going 
on to God, we can only say, Man came first. We saw 
in him the closest analogy. But the raiment of God ; 
and the mark of His busy fingers ; and His tokens 
(which were all that we saw of man), — were precisely 
similar as empirical beliefs. 

Hence the consequences. 

First, man is intelligent ; therefore God must be 
intelligent. Second, man is powerful ; therefore God 
must be powerful. Third, man is somewhere ; there- 



35$ Theology. [Book V. 

fore God must be somewhere. Fourth, man has vir- 
tue ; therefore God must be virtuous. And, as virtu- 
ousness is a quality of emotion, and emotion has to do 
with happiness, (fifth) God must be happy. Teleolog- 
ically we infer all this : loosely, at first ; but endlessly 
confirmed by analogies of working. 

And there is one great mercy in empiricism. The 
things that are most important, have the closest anal- 
ogies. Power ; that is a shadowy ghost : I dimly 
realize it. Being ! who sees it ? Place ! it is half a fig- 
ment. God's Person, I know is little like, and His 
mind nothing similar, to any of His creatures. But 
His morals are close up at once. What a mercy ! The 
only thing we are to give account for : the only thing 
we are to win heaven by : the only thing we need Christ 
for : I mean the only region of thought in which guilt 
and the need of an atonement and the purchase of the 
Spirit, nay, the only field in which the worship of God 
at all, is obligatorily set forth, is the only field that 
comes closest to my consciousness. I am conscious 
of His goodness if there be a God : but I am not con- 
scious of His wisdom ; nor am I conscious of His 
power : I am not conscious of His being. His wisdom 
and His power must be other things than mine. But, 
given a God empirically discovered, and His goodness 
is my goodness. I see it in Him as I do beauty in a 
star ; and I have, imbedded in my consciousness, the 
very thing I have to give an account of in the day 
of Heaven. 

CHAPTER V. 

GOD AS UNLIKE OTHER BEINGS. 

But, though God is like man in holiness, He is 
variously unlike man under the light of Ontological 



Chap, v.] God as Unlike Other Beings. 359 

analogies. We need more and other in God than what 
we need in man, as a theoretic percept. 

Being slowly recedes in man, till it lies back of all 
consciousness. This is the triumph of scientific light. 
But the religious triumph is still greater than this. 
It carries the thought still further in its analogies. A 
group of order was the first non-ego. I carried it 
back. I conceived of something that had the order, 
and gave the impact ! I conceded rock when I was 
not looking, — and spirit that had not (my) conscious- 
ness. But analogy travelled on, and I found SOME- 
BODY ELSE was working as I worked, and as my 
neighbor worked. I made a watch, but I found one 
in the sky. I made a pulley, but I found one in my 
cheeks. I made a telescope, but I found one in my 
eye. The analogies that would find man out, would be 
empirical of the Almighty ; but now with this differ- 
ence : — man would not now need so much efficiency. 
By the law of parcimony, much that we had conceived 
in man would be relegated to the Most High. 

Exactly now what our idea of God would be I need 
not depict. The simplicities of the thing have been 
altered by revelation. What our idea without revela- 
tion would amount to I need not measure. The sim- 
plicity of that reckoning has been altered by the Fall. 
Only this I say : — Travelling out from consciousness 
we would arrive first at the creature. And there, like 
an unfinished Road, there would be gathered much 
that would not be permanent at that terminus. When 
the road-building went on to God, much that had 
grown up by the way would be carried on to that 
abiding depot. 

See then the difference. Man has being, and God 
has being. But man's being must be so different from 



360 Theology. [Book V. 

God's as scarcely to claim the right to a common 
vocable. So Power. God has it ; and man has it : 
but God's power is so much more archaic than man's, 
as to breed a right to say, that both are the power of 
the Almighty. 

All is so shadowy that we forget that it is an empiri- 
cal result, where we clamor so for unity. Morals! 
there we ought all to agree. Wisdom ! there we ought 
to have but little difference. Infinity ! in the like of 
that we should be at one. But being ! as to what it 
is in essence; and power! as to what is mine and 
God's ; there we are in the clouds. Only this I say, 
that the best intellects have thought that all power 
was of God ; and that whatever we thought of ours, 
even our power was God's power in certain more 
important respects than it could possibly be our own 
efficiency. 

And then another important difference ! God is a 
Spirit. What is meant by that ? It does not mean 
that He is a tenuous fluid, or any atomic ether, such 
as we are quite apt to imagine ; but it means an em- 
blem. It means that He is of that tenuous sort that 
penetrates every atom. It means that He is a breath 
(Job xxxiv. 14), and like a breath can raise the dead. 
It means that He is pervasive like an ether: and 
therefore, that His personality is in His traits, not as 
with us as persons ; but, on the contrary, that He is 
entire everywhere ; as pervasive as a mist, and yet as 
local as though He were all an atom. 

These things we should keep in view. 

They are not a whit more shadowy than our own 
spirits. For nothing is seen but consciousness. And 
he has taken a good step, who holds himself possessed 
of just so little about being, as to be unencumbered for a 



Chap. VI.] God made Like where He is Unlike. 361 

stand, when differences that he does know, and light that 
he does possess, are dangerously brought to be denied. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE MISCHIEVOUS EFFECTS OF MAKING GOD RESEMBLE OTHER BEINGS 
WHERE HE DIFFERS FROM THEM. 

WILL has two provinces, musculation and atten- 
tion. Efficiency, as it belongs to man, is either 
brute efficiency, like the digestion of food or the 
nisus of a muscle, to which he contributes nothing con- 
sciously ; or it is mere volition ; volition being nothing 
but that complicated thought, which we have before 
described as being the whole of our imperial potency. 

An efficiency so narrow in man, and in many par- 
ticulars so helpless, we might be expected to transfer 
to God ; and we do so in two ways, leading to the two 
extremes, either (1), on the one side, of Pantheism, or 
(2), on the other, of Arminian independency, or segrega- 
tion of the divine and human. 

(1.) God may be the Former of our bodies, and the 
Father of our spirits ; and yet, if emblems, as those 
words undoubtedly are, are pushed too far, we attrib- 
ute, in spite of ourselves, some of our impotency to the 
Almighty. We are the former of a body, simply by 
altering its positions. If it is a statue, we chip some 
of its mass. If it be a photograph, we array the chem- 
icals ; we have hardly a dream of the modus quo ; we 
trust all to the actinic ray. If we are the father of a 
spirit, we are still darker. The Bushman has an im- 
mortal progeny, and hardly knows as much of what has 
come from him as the bee does of the wax upon his 
legs ; and no wonder ; for, what we call agency in man, 
is not even nisus. Musculation and attention are all 
16 



362 Theology. [Book V. 

that include the possible activities that are human. 
No wonder, therefore, that we should impair with them 
our conception of the divine. 

Hence that strange phantasy, that God comes to 
consciousness only in His works. The rock is not con- 
scious ; and, therefore, God is not conscious in the 
formation of the rock. Man is conscious ; and, there- 
fore, God is conscious only in man. In our attempt 
to conceive of God as a pervasive spirit, philosophers 
are strangely warped. Evolution must be blind evolu- 
tion. La Place's Theory must draw to it formative 
efficiences such as ours. Requiring a shrewder God 
than the older theories, it proclaims one less so; and 
driven from the narrower personality of man, we 
tumble into the opposite incompetency. We bury 
God in the nature of what He frames ; and, as Father 
of spirits, make Him no more conscious of His work, 
than man is, of the child that he has begotten. 

(2.) Driven from Pantheistic thought, the Church 
has gone stupidly to the opposite extreme. Man 
being a creator, God must be a Creator. Man creating 
mechanisms, God must; and must stand separate from 
what He makes, as man does from a ship or from a 
scythe. Man being the begetter of a son, God must 
be ; and must stand separate from the son whom He 
begets, as man does from the children that are given 
to him. 

See then the two extremes; — either, first, Herbert 
Spencer's Unknown, with all its blind obscurity, refus- 
ing to carry the analogy from man even as far as man's 
intelligence and man's conscious motive ; or, second, a 
universe set sailing like a ship. In either case it is the 
curse of emblems : in the one case man's agency made 
to fix its obscurity upon God's; and, in the other case, 



Chap. VI.] God made Like where He was Unlike. 363 

the ship, for example, made to pattern the sun or the 
planet ; the separateness of what we do, because really 
we do nothing very deep, made to separate God from 
His works ; made to create an atomic theory, for ex- 
ample ; and made to pronounce it heresy, unless some 
tertium quid separates God from the forces of the 
creature. 

Let us not be misunderstood here. We travel out 
from consciousness to the self and the not-self. Our 
chariot is analogy. It fades as it travels farthest. The 
ulterior not-self is the Almighty. I say, Hceret in cor- 
tice when we force the emblem. 

I mean that from the one analogy of man there 
spring two opposite Creators: — (1) One a Pantheistic 
one. The man on the locomotive rras no efficiency 
but will. That is of the very narrowest. The muscle 
and the rude engine effect the balance. What is the 
result ? We are steeped in such thoughts of God. He 
is the obscure will in the locomotive ; and if we are 
scientific men, we make Him pervade the work, but 
with a poor thread of consciousness. We separate 
Him not a moment. We bury Him in the whole de- 
sign. We tie Him fast in our idea. But He is the 
Grimy Engine-Driver. The great machine He drives 
is made to bury His obscure intelligence. 

But men have rarely science. Therefore the oppo- 
site error : — (2) The engine stands clear of the driver, — 
nay of the builder. That is the nature of man's work. 
He finishes it, and it may stand loose upon the track. 
Hence another analogy for God. Venus stands clear 
of Him, and may whirl without Him in her orbit. 
And if men shape that a little, and admit that He 
sustains the creature, still they are horrified even by 
Bible notions that in (h) Him all things consist (Col. i. 



364 Theology. [Book V. 

17). They must have some separate entity, such as 
man looks at when he completes a fabric. 

And though it is beyond a doubt that God is re- 
sponsible for His work, even though it stand aloof like 
a car upon the rail, yet there is this mixture in the 
thought. The way man puts out a work, and is done 
with it, and leaves it to itself, will taint with inevitable 
fault our thought of the Most High. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE MISCHIEVOUS EFFECTS OF MAKING GOD DIFFER FROM OTHER 
BEINGS WHERE HE RESEMBLES THEM. 

It is a kind provision of Providence ; or, perhaps, I 
should rather say, a glorious reality in the very nature 
of the case, — that God should be unlike us in secular 
traits, and like us in moral ones. He is omnipresent 
ancl local. We are only local. He is immense. We 
are limited. He is omniscient. We know nothing 
but our own consciousness. He is omnipotent. We 
have no power of a conscious sort ; only volition. 
Unless we include the body, which is really a not-self, 
we have no conscious nisus, and no imperial realm save 
our willing. When we say, He wills and it is done, we 
describe man. Man wills and it is done, but God has 
to do it. God wills and it is not done, unless there 
follows a stricter Efficiency, which actually accomplishes 
the work which the Will designs to be done. 

Now there is a vast perversity in man in that in 
these natural traits in which God does not resemble us 
we make Him resemble us, and in moral traits in which 
He does resemble us we make Him differ. We have 
seen the former of these in the previous chapter. 

The latter we start into best, perhaps, by thinking 



Chap. VII.J God made Unlike where He is Like. 365 

of this concept, — will. What is will? It is a narrow 
exercise that looks to the muscle and to the act of 
attention. We impute it to God. We speak of the 
will of the Supreme. We make it broad as His works : 
not foolishly, if we remember that it is an emblem, 
and not hurtfully, if we make it accord with the broad 
affections of the Most High. 

But now notice. It illustrates both errors. We 
make it like, where it is unlike ; and unlike, where it is 
like ; and just as we have said. Where it is a secular 
trait, we make God's will like man's will; and where 
it is a moral exercise, we make them differ. 

Let me explain. 

(1) The will of man as a natural efficiency is an 
efficiency at all only in an imaginary way. We will, 
and there is motion. That is ail our conscious knowl- 
edge. We are imperial because we are dependent. If 
we were omnipotent, we would have to make the 
motion ourselves ; but, as we are dependent, God 
makes it ; and, as the fruit of this dependence, we 
attribute to God the sort of will that we witness in 
ourselves. 

How common the remark, that the universe sur- 
vives by God's naked will. 

Hence our delight in the rhetoric of the Bible. 
" He spake, and it was done. He commanded, and 
it stood fast." 

And though, with God, there is no logos like this, 
but a patient travelling to results ; and molecular work 
in every hand-breadth, — yet there is this strange per- 
versity, — which makes the emotions of Heaven com- 
mand as ours do, and makes Providence a law, as 
though there were something to obey it outside of 
Deity. 



366 Theology. [Book V. 

(2) But hugging the analogy where it fails, we cast 
loose from it in. those higher particulars where it 
obtains and would bless us. The will of God is like 
the will of man in its moral attributes. Holiness is a 
quality. It belongs to two emotions (Ethics, D. I. Chap. 
VI.). One of these is benevolence. The other is a 
love to the holy or right quality itself. These are all 
that is worth living for in man ; and these are all that 
is worth existing for in the Most High. 

Dim in a conception of any being, it is a mercy that 
we know most of God just in the direction in which we 
have to worship Him ; and, now, it is a strange per- 
versity, that, having compared Him with man in all 
natural particulars, we begin to separate Him here, 
just in the point where we possess His image. 

How we do this has appeared already under the 
head of Ethics. Suffice it to say, again, We make a 
different right for God than we do for His creatures. 
We give Him hard attributes. We make man all for 
duty. We make God all for Himself. We make man 
love right in itself considered. We make God make 
right ; and we suffer its obligation to depend upon a 
decision of. His will. We make God primordially 
revengeful ; man not so ; God aiming for display ; man 
never; God not doing the best ; man bound to; God 
not bound for the best possible work; man always 
(see Dr. Hodge's Systematic Theology, passim) ; in one 
word, the morals of man* differing from the morals of 
God ; impairing the rule, that we are to be holy as God 
is holy (1 Pet. i. 15). 

And, now, the evils of this are immense. All entity 
being empirical, because arrived at, whether self or not- 
self, by shadowy analogies, it is an immense outfit to 
start in the search with the intuitions of virtue. God 



Chap. VII.] God made Unlike zvhere He is Like. 367 

may be singularly Unknown ; yet, if we can put into 
Him the timbers of virtue, — make that the end, — make 
that also the root, — declare that God would not desire 
to be, nay, would not consent to act, but for the sake of 
holiness, — we make a queen-cell that will vastly central- 
ize the hive. Then there maybe many drones. Then 
there may be dreadful battles. Then there may be 
vast mistakes about the outworks of our theism. Then 
we can wait for science till she settles her shifting 
facts. That soul is wonderfully at peace that has its 
refuge in its conscious part, and in plenitude of hope 
as to what will turn up at last in empirical demon- 
stration. 

But the opposite, viz. an unmoral God ; that is, a 
being not humane, or with no intelligible excellency, — 
is just the idol to destroy the personality of Jehovah. 
It breeds the Pantheist. What care I for Pantheism, 
if it only transfuses God in His works ? He has not a 
bald will ; but, on the contrary, a diffused efficiency. 
He cannot stand off and order, but must go in and 
work ; and, being in, all over the universe, I do not 
object to knowing that I live in Him, and have my 
being (Acts xvii. 28). But how can I get him back 
again, without His holiness? How can I get Him 
back out of myself, if you confuse me in my notion of 
His being a God of conscience ? That monstrous 
dream of an unconscious Deity, with no light, and no 
separate thought, and no individual accountability for 
what He does, is most of all promoted by destroying 
conscience ; that is, by taking away from Him a virtu- 
ousness like man's, and causing us to merge His ex- 
cellence into a dry Supremacy. 



368 Theology. [Book. V. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

PANTHEISM. 

THE outer world reveals itself to us by our five 
senses. The revelation is said to be made to us in 
every instance by power. I do not mean by this that 
what I see is power. On the contrary, what I see is 
sense. If I smell a flower, the fragrance is an absolute 
consciousness. So of a note in music, or of the light, 
or of a hard surface, or of a taste : what I actually per- 
ceive, is a naked consciousness. But, without going 
back to bring up tediously the analogies, no one doubts 
that matter gets at sense by power. If I taste, or 
smell, or see visions, or feel warmth, or hear a bugle- 
note, the thing is done by impact. Force is used upon 
the nerve in every instance of sensational perceiving. 

Then that is a plausible account of matter, that it 
consists in power. Other ingredients have dropped off. 
It began with order. But the grouping of harmonized 
sensations will not answer ; for, after all, order is not 
being ; and sensation itself is something different from 
metaphysical* existence. Body helped much at its 
birth ; but body is one form of it : so did will ; but 
will is itself perception. It helped as a shadow of 
power ; but soon disappeared as not efficiency. Cause 
vanished also ; not as a thing of no sense; but as the 
same as power. The best thinking that the world can 
give, is always bringing back this idea ; — that there 
may be ten million things in the world beside power ; 
nay, that there may be no power in the shadowy way 
in which we conceive it ; but that the very best image 

* I say, metaphysical, and the reader must notice such cautionary 
terms, or else excuse us for the tediousness of repeating, that, as a mere 
usage of speech, existence does include the instant sensation. 



Chap. VIII.] Pantheism. 369 

we can make of the world is power; and that, by the 
law of parcimony, we have no reason to posit substance, 
in the vulgar form in which it is asserted. 

1. For, as the first step ; if sound sense seems to be 
offended, let us treat her difficulties. If she says, 
Something is necessary that must have the power ; or, 
with more particular plainness, something must resist 
it, and something must exert it,— let us look at this 
more narrowly. We are to acknowledge molecular 
atoms on the solitary plea that matter cannot act 
where it is not ; or that force needs something actively 
to possess it, and forcibly to resist its onslaught. 

But notice. 

Where is the matter between the atoms ? Air is 
infinitely compressible. That means, the learned 
tell us, that its atomic grains are each of them distant. 
What holds them ? Force. What sort of force ? Re- 
pulsion. What kindred force ? Attraction : which 
keeps them reined in to their place, and keeps repul- 
sion from repelling endlessly. Where is the matter 
between the atoms? for if it is ice or silver, there is 
an appreciable distance ? How does atom get hold 
of atom? And if the very essence of the theory is, 
that matter must be there to hold the force, or to meet 
the wrestle, where is there any between the monads ? 
and where is the good of substance if it fails to meet 
us at the very point desired ? 

2. But, secondly ; if matter be nothing but power, 
self may be nothing but power, and for the same 
reasons. 

This we admit 

At the same time we claim, that we have gone far- 
ther on a most shadowy path, and where there is the 
largest room for the very utmost difference. 



37° Theology. [Book V. 

Power at all is a mere shadow, — a high empirical 
conceit. Power, as force, is a clearer notion ; because 
analogous to the conscious nisus. But power as a 
power to think, is the dimmest of the dim. Still 
there is an analogy ; and I admit that there is no sub- 
stance in mind, that can be thought of as separate from 
power, unless it be a suppositional something, which we 
all along admitted, viz. a creature of our ignorance ; 
that, whereas (i) we know nothing but power, and r 
again, (2) little of power and much of our ignorance 
about it, therefore, third, (3) there may be a vast deal 
else, and indeed must be a vast deal more, than we 
have ever brought to be intelligently considered. 

But a posited something ; made familiar to us, and 
given names to by us as a substantial ego, — that we 
are not convinced of. Power is by analogy. The first 
power was my muscle. Nay it was a complex thing, 
first my will, and then my nisus. It corrupted the 
notion. It carried it into matter. It tainted it with 
a gross duality. It carried it into mind. And I con- 
fess I am not prepared to say that there is a brutum 
tertium, — first a power to think, then a substance. I 
cannot fix polemically three quiddities as certain ; 
first, thought ; second, power to think ; and third, sub- 
stance, — this last separate from God, and looked at as 
isolated work like a car upon the rail. 

But then why should I ? Who cares for the mere 
hulk, if I keep the conscience ? There is the difficulty. 
Men shudder when we throw man so closely upon God. 
as to deny the molecules ; because they shudder for 
God. They think man is bad company for Him. The 
brutum ens is necessary to give man a separate respon- 
sibility ; otherwise bad acts are God's acts. This is 
the gist of the polemic. Men would not care what we 



Chap. VIII.] Pantheism. 37 1 

did with an intervening hulk, if we did not throw 
man blasphemously upon God ; and did not make 
the wickedness of man too much the part of the 
Almighty. 

But now, notice. What defends God if we adopt 
the molecule? Did we make it? Are we responsible 
for it ? Did we bring our wicked selves into being? 
Did we begin far back in eternity, and decree all our 
going? Do we uphold these lives of ours? and could 
we carry them without 'concur sus ? and could we possess 
them a single moment without the power of the Most 
High? Now, imperatively, where is the difference? 
If I live in Him and have my being (Acts xvii. 28), 
where is the responsibility of God greater if I live by 
the mere flow of His power, than if He has bred some 
substantial ens, and keeps it in being by the breath of 
His lips? It seduces men, to prate a difference. We 
have shown already what morals are. We have shown 
the likeness between God and His creature. And 
though it is beyond our ken how God could create 
such a wicked world ; yet it is not beyond our ken 
that He does do it. " I form the light and create 
darkness. I make peace and create evil " (Is. xlv. f). 
It is not beyond our ken that the potter has " power 
over the clay" (Rom. ix. 21), and that it is disgraceful 
to God to defend Him, as with the Ahriman of the 
East, by the shelter of intervening particles. 

3. But the best men will say, You are mad. You 
are not seeing the vile consequence. You are sinking 
man into God. You are sinking matter into mind. If 
rock is nothing logically but power, then whose power ? 
If man is nothing but a power to think, then whose 
power to think ? and, logically, whose thought ? 
Moreover, if power does not imply substance, how 



372 Theology. [Book V. 

God's power? And are we to have the madness over 
again of denying entity to the Great Almighty? 

Now, with abundant caution : — 

Note ; here are five difficulties, — (i) If matter is 
only power, what holds the power or meets its pressure ? 
(2) If matter is only power, mind is only power. (3) 
If matter and mind are only power, — whose power? or 
is there any room for maintaining a power of God 
separate and different from the power of either ? (4) If, 
therefore, mind is only power, how do we teach a 
responsibility of God separate from the responsibility 
of His creature? And (5) if mind is only power, God 
is only power ; for how can we argue substance in 
God, if we deny it as possible to be demonstrated in 
the instance of the creature ? 

Now, first ; that matter is only power we have not 
taught. We have been infinitely far from teaching it. 
We have felt Herbert Spencer's reasonableness in 
much of his argument for the Unknowable. We do 
not know what matter is. The use of infidels is to 
scour the bottom of the faith. We scout his atheism ; 
but it clears our theism. What we really teach is, 
that by the law of parcimony power covers all we 
know ; that we have no right to imagine atoms ; that 
they are bred of certain dualities of will ; that they do 
not account for the results ; that it is ours to seize 
power as the best residuary gleam ; and to admit the 
possibility of more ; nay, to assert that there must be 
much unknowable, — under the forms of matter. 

Second, precisely the same of mind. 

Third ; precisely the same of sin. An appeal is to 
the law of parcimony. I do not deny that there are 
difficulties about power ; but atoms do not help them. 
I do not deny there are difficulties about sin. But 



Chap. VIII.] Pantheism. 373 

atoms do not help them. I prefer to mark down great 
facts about God, and imagine that something unknow- 
able will come to reconcile them. It belittles Him to 
appeal to atoms. To say that He upholds me con- 
stantly, and so much that I vanish without Him, and 
then to make that less responsible than some more 
direct nakedness of Power, is to make an unworthy 
difference. Men see through such things. It is far 
better to speak like Paul (Rom. ix. 21). If I sin when 
upheld by God, it is explained just as little, consider- 
ing all the circumstances of that upholding, as if I 
sinned if I live in God (Acts xvii. 28). It is better 
to imagine unknown circumstances of explanation. 
This usual defence does mischief by its clear imperti- 
nency. 

So of the last point. If mind may be only power, 
God may be only power. That is, analogies, out from 
consciousness, leading us at last to power, if they teach 
nothing more in matter, and if they teach nothing more 
in mind, teach nothing more in God. Atoms, if not 
necessary to hold power, and not imaginable indeed, 
and therefore not noticeable, in mind ; — I mean by 
that, mental atoms, or, more properly speaking, some 
mental substance, — the same argument would strip a 
substance away from the Almighty. 

This is partly sound and partly unsound. 

1. It is partly sound ; because if we do not see a 
substance ; if it is bred of human weakness ; if it comes 
from muscular power ; if it arises from where our 
thinking began, viz. from the muscular nisus, preceded 
by the desires of will, — then it is traceable how we got 
it into matter, and it is not traceable, how we ought to 
get it into God. God has no nisus, and no muscular 
will. He has no duality of nature. He moves uniquely 



374 Theology. [Book V. 

and at a blow. Why He need to have substance to 
hold power is scarcely apparent ; and the whole thing 
seems disreputable. In other words, — Power alone as 
being God is (a shockingly inadequate idea, but) just 
as adequate as a Powerful Substance, or Powerful Spirit, 
or Powerful Entity, distinct from power, which like the 
two lines in the vapor betoken the medium of human 
life through which we see it. 

The Divine is " invisible." This is the doctrine of the 
Bible. Marking empirical boundaries is, therefore, dan- 
gerous work. Imputing brute atoms to man, reflectively 
bears upon God. Imputing stark substance to God, 
reflectively bears upon man. Both theories play into 
each other. But when we come to ask for proof, we are 
left with this idea, — God is a Power. Even that is a 
shadowy idea. And all beyond is the region of the 
Unknown. He is a false defender who binds himself 
with the small cords of his fancy when called upon for 
proof of what is essential to the Most High. 

2. Nevertheless stripping substance away from God 
because we strip it away from man is partly unsound. 
Stripping it away from either is sensible enough if it 
rebuke the folly of theorizing and explaining substance 
as though it could be consciously conceived. Stripping 
it away from neither, is sensible, too, if it simply mean 
that there is more in both than power can possibly 
contain. But stripping it away from God has a redun- 
dancy of fault in this last direction, because power 
could do better for man in its shadowy shape than it 
possibly could for God, as our whole idea. Man could 
live in God, but who could God live in ? Empirically, 
and as a mere following of the like, we could dream of 
man as a mere immanence of power. But God is the 
great terminus. Analogy has reached its crest. There 



Chap. VIII.] Pantheism. 375 

cannot be anything beyond. And, therefore, the 
conjecture (that is a very good word), the throwing to- 
gether, of analogies from self, dictates a terminal will, 
and therefore a something, if it is ever to be traced, 
an origin, if it is ever to be conceived, and Being in its 
most real sense, if it ever be needed to explain the 
order of the universe. 

It is all empirical, and, therefore, all unconscious; 
but the LIKE, as it reaches out, speaks more for an Ens, 
when it comes to deal with the Almighty. 

Anchorage in this tossed ocean can always be found 
in the region of Ethics. What would God be without 
it ? What would creeds be ? Theology would be a 
creeping dream. 

Let us notice this point. The very gem of evi- 
dences is to be found in morals. 

Ontology might be much more machine-like but 
for the phenomenon of conscience : and morals, whether 
in God or man, is the mother of all those proofs which 
are teleologically rich in shaping the Deity. 

And blessed be God, it is a conscious thing that is 
essential ! 

And be careful here ! 

Let me not be misunderstood. Power is essential. 
Being is essential. Skill is essential. But what I 
mean is, essential in our knowlege of God. Power is 
of the most shadowy ; Being, not less so ; Skill, un- 
searchable. But Holiness is right under our eye. 
What a mercy this is ! The great trait of God is con- 
scious. Be very particular with this. That God has 
a conscience depends of course upon His having a 
being. That He had a being is empirical, and, there- 
fore, metaphysically not intuitive, and, philosophically, 



376 Theology. ■ [BookV. 

never certain. Nay, that He has a conscience if He 
has a being, is empirical besides. 

What we thank God for, therefore, may be easily 
misunderstood. 

There is a great theory. The sum of it we call 
Theology. The pith of it is, that it takes all the 
facts. It pins Itself together. Like a gallant arch, it 
holds by its mass. Morality is the key-stone. It 
could not get into its place without the others ; but, 
being there, it is singularly defined and well shaped. 
Now, what I mean is, that everything else may lie in 
the haze. Power, what that may be, and substance, 
how that is to be fixed, and life, how that is to be sup- 
posed to live ; atoms, how they are to be understood, 
and molecular physics, how that is to be fashioned 
forth, — lie in shadow ; ought to do so, because they 
are uncertain ; must do so, because they are empirical ; 
and have done so in every period of the world. 

But morality, once set in place, is evident. It 
belongs to consciousness. I know what right is. God, 
as powerful, is a mist. God, as conscious, is a riddle. 
God, as anything you think, is a wonder, and a maze. 
But God, as good, is all simplicity. I draw to Him at 
once. And it steadies all other thought. Here is 
where theologians ought to stand ; and, like a captain 
on his deck, the watchful believer on this key-stone of 
the arch should govern all his theories. 

(1) Matter, therefore, may be only power. Why ? 
Because I see no ground for atoms. (2) Mind, therefore, 
may be only power. Why? By a kindred parcimony. 
(3) Power, too, may be all of God. Why ? Because 
why the opposite ? (4) God, then, must be responsi- 
ble for sin. No : because God is holy. God does not 
sin the sin if man sins it ; and God cannot sin in men if 



Chap. VIII.] Pantheism. - 377 

He acts from the impulse of benevolence, and from the 
love of holiness in Himself and in the universe. (5) 
Still, He must be a Power, therefore ? Not necessa- 
rily. That would limit God by our knowledge. He 
must be more than power ; because, as Spencer estab- 
lishes the fact, He must be much that is unknowable. 
But that He is specifically this or that, spirit or matter, 
being, as substantial ens, — all this, is mere insanity. 
He is Power. This Power is guided by conscience. 
This power is itself a shadow. We know nothing of 
His essence. And the man who insists that there are 
atoms, that he may insist that there is a God, is losing 
the whole logic that he seeks, and likening the Deity 
to a material image. 

To what extent, then, may true philosophy be Pan- 
theistic ? 

To this extent ; — that it may deny to matter atoms 
in the more brutish sense. How far is that Pantheism ? 
Not at all in that pestilent folly that makes God find 
His being in matter, and find His consciousness and 
His only personality in human minds. We not only 
execrate this, but we do not even understand how it 
could have arisen. If God's power is matter, and 
God's activity is the ceaseless producer of mind, He 
needs all the more on that account a mind of His own, 
and a separate personality; where thought and morals 
may hold their court. We do not so much as know 
why, when God emerged as always in the creature, pro- 
ducing him always, and never able to be rid of him by 
setting him apart, that therefore we should suppose 
that God is less personal, and must, therefore, bulk into 
the universe, and be the creature that He is perpetu- 
ally issuing into being. We need, the rather, more of 
a Person on this account. And, moreover, to call us 



378 Theology, [Book V. 

Pantheists, you must satisfy another thought. We are 
merely negative. We merely deny brutish atoms. 
We merely say, They have no foundation. We merely 
see that power is the shadowy idea. We say that 
power itself is the flimsiest conceit. We are merely 
holding to parcimony. And instead of saying, There 
is nothing but this or that, we are distinctly advancing 
the Unknowable. It is not atoms ; it is not entity ; it 
is not a brutum quid ; it is not intelligibly anything to 
mislead us by its imagined marks ; but it is, what the 
Bible calls it, an " Invisible " (i Tim. i. 17; Col. i. 15). 
We are only Pantheists in the privative refusal of its 
being known. We are anything you please as to a 
room for a Jehovah's being. 

Going back, therefore, to Ontology with its distinct 
avowal that the not-self is either perception or else 
some fabrication from perception by analogy and dif- 
ference, we give that as our account of God. He is 
not atoms, because we have no thought of atoms, and, 
therefore, among a thousand things we have no reason 
why that surd thing should be. He is not spirit, for' 
a kindred reason, that when we come to speak with 
emphasis there is nothing inside the word that we dis- 
tinctly mean. But He is a Spirit as a verisemblance 
to man. Spirit is nothing ontological. It is philo- 
logical. It means a breath. It means that as a breath 
God pervades ; that as a breath God acts ; that as a 
breath He is invisible. And the very name betokens 
rather a blind something impossible to be conceived, 
than a bold-faced word attempting intelligence as to 
a style of being. 

We believe in God, therefore, because we believe in 
man. We believe in God mainly as of the image He 
gave to man. We believe in God most of all as by 



Chap. VIII.] Pantheism. 379 

our moral image. That thought of Him is best that 
comes under the eye of conscience. I am a theist, 
therefore, most and strongest in the realm of Ethics. 
When you drive me out of what is moral, I catch up 
but the dimmest shadows. I make no, complaint of 
this. Worship involving morals, and law involving 
morals, and judgment only morals, it is to me an un- 
speakable relief that morals will bring me nearest to 
the Deity through all the period of my being. What 
He is in essence it concerns me less that I should con- 
ceive. To keep His morals right, I see no advantage 
in molecular atoms, or that I should be anything but 
an immanence from Him. Did I assert I do, I should 
equivocate ; for I see no superior responsibility in God 
did He continually create, than did He make me 
separate, and yet hold me up all the time. I see no 
piety in thinking that the ego is more than power. 
And if the ego is no more than power, then Panthe- 
ism is true in a certain Christian sense. But that 
the ego is only power would be a vague conceit if a 
man did not perceive how shadowy it is ; if he did not 
remember how false it is ; if he did not confess how 
certainly ten thousand other things are likely to be 
true ; and if he did not pursue the negative plan of 
merely denying results. I will not believe in atoms, 
and I will not believe in mind, and I will not believe in 
God as an intelligible ens, for this is the hypocrisy of 
belief. Power is the shadow that He has given to 
bring us near to the conception of a being. 



3 8 ° Theology. [Book V. 



CHAPTER IX. 

POLYTHEISM. 

POLYTHEISM might be reached in two ways; either, 
first, by a highly polished people slowly declining ; or, 
by a low, brutal people slowly climbing up. 

1. Polytheism as a symbol of decay, is where a 
polished people, possessing the idea that God pervades 
all His works, choose an object indiscriminately, and 
take it as a reminder of the presence of the Deity. 
This, which, at first, might be thought innocent, be- 
comes, as divine truth dies out, the origin of multitudes 
of idols. 

2. The other is the opposite route : we doubt 
whether it has been ever travelled, — where a savage, 
seeing power in himself, imagines it in a tree and in a 
rock. This supposes the childhood of the race, and 
imagines thought actually travelling out to the Invisi- 
ble. We doubt whether it ever made that journey. 
We believe in an original revelation, and doubt whether 
it was ever lost ; that is, whether any tribe of men 
were so entirely embruted, that they had initially to 
think out the fact of a Divinity. 

It makes little difference, however. 

I mean in the view of Polytheism. It makes great 
difference in the respect of Archaic Science. But, in 
the respect of Polytheism., it would be reaching it, 
going up or coming down ; and it would be reaching 
the same result. A man, seeing divinity in himself, I 
mean a certain image of what is divine, sees that things 
around him are like him, and is therefore very likely to 
put will and intelligence into the storm or into the 
plant that acts as he acts. This, is done, therefore, by 



Chap. x.J Evolution. 381 

multitudes. Nevertheless, if we read Hindoo literature, 
or search deeply even into the fetich-worshipping as 
among the blacks, we will find that Polytheism is never 
a square thing among a people. The more brutish 
conceive of it in part, but their gangas explain it away. 
There is but one God among the more thinking class ; 
and we can find Him with the Malay and the black as 
a unitary or Nzambi Deity. 

CHAPTER X. 

EVOLUTION. 

EVOLUTION, as a doctrine of Ontology, is attracting 
more attention than perhaps any other of the beliefs 
of men. On this very account it is unsettled. We 
shall trace the most common doctrine; or rather, that 
thread of thought that runs through most of the sys- 
tems. If any man believes in the eternity of matter, 
or some one else believes in the interference of God, or 
still another in Divine support, and yet still claims Evo- 
lution, we will not be able to give each all his theory : 
for, in the nature of things, we must choose one central 
stem, and, in this eclectic account, call that Evolution 
that lies nearest to the centre, and which takes in most 
of the thought of most of the promoters of this influ- 
ential system. 

Evolution shall be the doctrine of those who believe 
that matter, in its full quantum, was originally created 
with such gifts as would enable it to live apart from- 
its Creator, and with such powers as would enable it 
gradually to evolve all specific changes, and all the 
developed facts of life and spirit. Matter, with this 
creed, is the origin of thought ; but not with the ab- 
surd faith, that the weight-qualities, and the force- 



382 Theology. [BookV. 

qualities, and the blue-qualities, of observed matter, 
are to be attached to its thought-results, but simply 
that there is one original ens, and that the greater Ens, 
in originally endowing it, gifted it with all that lives, 
and that the shooting of a ray, and the shooting of a 
sprout, and the shooting of a thought, unconscious as 
we are how they are arranged, are arranged in one ; as, 
by the appearances of matter, there is the same ex- 
haustion of power in producing one as in producing 
the other. 

Evolution, therefore, is an eternal system, not 
eternal a parte ante, but eternal a parte post, by which 
a nebular mist, freighted for an eternal voyage, has, 
stored within it, all change, and by powers resident in 
its parts, and by powers acting back upon it from other 
parts, not even excepting the change (inexplicable) of 
thought and consciousness. 

Let it be noticed, that this does not get rid of God ; 
but rather makes Him great : neither indeed of Tele- 
ology, but rather enforces it ; for it leaves all the ex- 
isting marks of current design, and adds the unspeak- 
able feat of providing it in the original creation. 

How, therefore, could I reject the system ? I 
could reject it, first, if it clashed with Ethics. There, 
on that account, will be our first inquiry. I could 
reject it, second, if it clashed with Scripture. There 
will be our second. I do reject it, thirdly, because it 
embroils Ontology. Such, therefore, will be our order 
of discourse. I. We do not object to Evolution as 
thwarting Ethics. II. We do not consider it as as- 
sailing Revelation. III. But we do consider it as no 
Ontology. Here, where the system claims the most, 
we regard it as unspeakably the weakest. Its develop- 
ment facts weave in better with better systems : and 



Chap. XI.] Evolution and Ethics. 383 

yet, ontologically tried, the man who reasons differently 
upon the material facts has a perfect right to his scheme ; 
and, if he deal fair with Ethics, and allow A CERTAIN 
CORRECTIVE on the part of Christianity, we have no 
objections. A pious Evolutionist will be a constant 
phenomenon among future believers. 

CHAPTER XI. 

EVOLUTION UNDER THE LIGHT OF ETHICS. 

ETHICS teaches the fact that God's highest motive 
is His holiness. Ethics, therefore, teaches the fact, 
that this universe is the holiest possible. For, either 
God's holiness, which is really His highest object, must 
diminish the holiness of His creature, or else the high- 
est holiness of His creature is the object of God. Now 
of two things one, either God does not reach His high- 
est object, or the holiness of His creature is the great- 
est possible. 

There are great numbers of His creatures, and 
there is an eternity for them to live in. God, there- 
fore, must strike a balance. If His object is the high- 
est holiness of His creatures, He must prefer the 
greatest number and the longest time. It follows 
that He might sacrifice som^ of the number (Ethics, 
D. I. Chap. XL.), and some of the time. 

We cannot tell a priori which must be the time. 
God, wishing to give the greatest holiness through the 
greatest time, might be thrown upon the earliest time. 
As with Satan, holiness might come first, and trespass, 
or even reduced" holiness, from lesser light and less 
spiritual endowment, follow after. We cannot con- 
sciously decide. But the vast probabilities are, from 
mere passing analogy, that holiness must grow. I am 



384 Theology. [BookV. 

speaking now ethically, without the Bible. The path 
of the just would naturally brighten. For though 
Adam did not grow, but fall, and righteousness has no 
merit without the fixedness of a covenant, yet, in its 
total sphere, morals has probabilities of advance, and 
in that case it has its Evolution. At any rate, God 
gives the highest holiness ; and this involves the sum 
of the creature and the sum of its duration. And if 
the aggregate advances, then this follows, — viz. that 
each particular moment is holier than the last, and 
grows holy upon the last, and that there results a 
scheme of ethical Evolution. Each last moment is 
for it the holiest possible ; yet the next is holier. And 
the Evolution goes on. If this is to be the rule for 
eternity, then there is an eternal Evolution. And 
when we remember what this involves ; and that hap- 
piness is to keep pace with holiness ; and that matter 
is to be the handmaid of either; we see the conse- 
quence, that Evolution, if the right Ontology, comes 
right in place. God must have had an original scheme. 
That scheme, if the holiest possible, must be necessarily 
one. God had no liberty : none in the vagrant sense. 
He preferred A BEST which was always mapping His 
work. And, therefore, if His course was fixed, and He 
had power to create a protoplasm, it is no contradiction 
of Ethics that He bred all change in the egg. Credat 
Judceus. With a certain corrective that Revelation 
gives, and with room for that corrective that even Dar- 
win leaves, let these egg-builders go on. 

Ethics makes sure to me a beltistic scheme. Ethics 
makes probable, at least, one that shall advance. Grant 
me this much, and I have an Evolution of my own ; 
an Evolution that takes in miracle and every change ; 
an Evolution that never flags ; an Evolution set to a 



Chap. XII.] Evolution and Revelation. 3S5 

hair, because, on its base, it can never alter ; an 
Evolution, therefore, built upon a original decree, that 
needs no retouching of the plan, and that would look 
smilingly upon a scheme {if one corrective were allowed) 
that would make a nebulous egg act, once it was laid, 
independently of the Most High. 

Our Evolution no facts can oppose. There is pain 
in the world. Well, we have seen that even the inno- 
cent can suffer pain. There is death in the world ! 
Well, even the innocent can suffer death. We have 
seen that death existed before apostasy. Shoals of 
mammals suffered death thousands of ages before there 
was sin. Justice I would like to look better at when I 
arrive at Heaven. But benevolence and the love of 
virtue, — these I can look clearly at now. They are 
conscious. These are by God's side, His Builders * 
(Prov. viii. 30). These know no exception. What they 
demand of animal pain, — that is Justice. What they 
give up, — that perishes. What they build, — that 
stands. And as they are exquisitely precise, they have 
but one dictate. And all I mean to say is, that if Evo- 
lution has but one dictate, and that the wisest and the 
best, God might have put it in the egg, and shown 
only the more in that one respect His strange Omni- 
potence. 

CHAPTER XII. 

EVOLUTION UNDER THE LIGHT OF REVELATION. 

Evolution is thought to contradict the Mosaic 
Record. Certainly, under the hand of some expound- 
ers of it, it does do it. We do very wrong not to dis- 
tinguish better than we do one field of Theology from 

* See Commentary. 
17 



385 Theology. [BookV 

another. One field of Theology is Theism. Another 
field, requiring different proof, is Christianity. We do 
very wrong that we let both these fields get embroiled 
together. It ought to be remembered that Theism is 
much the less vulnerable. When we behave as though 
Theism were ceaselessly in danger, and let it share all 
the panics that belong to technical Christianity, we 
build with very unphilosophical haste. We should 
posit Theism, and get that well entrenched, and then 
proceed to what is Christian. 

Let us do something of this logical sort. 

Revelation is of two kinds, that which might be 
known without it, and that which might not be. The 
word might must be peculiarly handled. When I enter 
under the first head Theism, I must distinguish. It 
might be found out, considering man to be perfect, or 
it might be found out by perfect men in a long heredity, 
but this is doubtful. Let us define the might by say- 
ing that one class of revelations could be demonstrated 
after they were revealed, and one class could not be. 
In one class would be Theism, and in the other, for 
example, the Incarnation. 

I. Now this first class is but little exposed by 
Ontology. 

I. Take for illustration the fact of a Decree. If 
Darwin is right, all future is fixed in an original mist. 
How could he object to Predestination ? Or bring, to 
test his theory, the ideas of Ethics. If God would 
have existed singly but for an Ethical taste ; if that 
taste is a love of holiness ; if that taste rules each suc- 
cessive act, and begets but one line by the possibilities 
of the case, and that the very holiest and the best, — Pre- 
destination is but another name. The dust that floats 
in the air is where it is by the Almighty ; is where it is 



Chap. XII.] Evolution and Revelation. 387 

as the very best ; is where it is by a decree ; and the 
three propositions are all blended into one ; and take 
in kindly, too, the original egg, if that be the method 
that God originally fixed for the fulfilment of His will. 
2. So of miracle. Darwin teaches the greatest 
miracle. I beg that this may be considered. We 
think of Darwin as putting an end to all miracles. 
But how unjustly. Darwin I do not speak of in his 
detail. I do not answer for him in his miscellaneous 
speech. He may say a thousand things that are pro- 
fane. I only say that Evolution, as above declared, is 
very favorable to miracle. And I press home the 
proof. The greatest miracle on earth is Darwin's mir- 
acle. And after that there is room for all. Darwin is 
right in saying that miracle is a matter of faith. Hav- 
ing announced the loftiest miracle that we can conceive, 
viz. the creation of the mist,* he justly says that, after 
that, it must be against nature. What can be more 
reasonable? For, having transcended me in miracle, 
that is, having announced one that I cannot grapple, 
going beyond all other theists to speak of God as cre- 
ating all things in a single egg, what can he deny after- 
ward ? This he distinctly notices. He does not deny 
miracle, but shuts it out into the region of faith. Well, 
is it not in the region of faith ? He says it denies 
nature. Well, does it not deny nature ? Nay, does it 
not suspend it, and bring it to an end ? Does it not 
violate it ? and cause it to take up its thread afterward,, 
and begin anew? Is not this the very nature of mir- 

* We are imputing here to Darwin the evolution not exactly in the 
shape in which he holds it. We have explained this already. He be- 
lieves in protoplasm. We have chosen a main stem of theory, and treated 
it as representative of all. Darwin would doubtless posit many proto- 
plasms. We mention one clear theory, and that is to be representative 
of all the rest. 



3 88 Theology. [Book. V. 

acle ? And though I carry science into the domain of 
faith, and speak of mental science, and of ethical sci- 
ence, and theological science, and though, therefore, 
science carries me to miracle, and carries me to the 
very throne of God, yet Darwin's Evolutionism is in a 
lower sphere. Darwin's Evolution must be violated by 
miracle. But the system does not forbid that it should 
be so violated : only it says, You must get your proof 
from a higher reasoning. Darwin has set the model 
of a most astounding act ; and no act that can possibly 
follow can be half the miracle of the mist in its original 
creation. 

3. And now of prayer. 

It is a false argument that says that prayer is in- 
consistent with Darwinism, and that demands miracle, 
or demands extemporized Providences, in order to 
answer our requests. Of course I must insist that 
Darwinism must be what I have defined. To follow it 
into all its wanderings, or to believe this or that infidel 
speech, is another affair. That God built all things at 
a stroke, that is, created a mist, and endowed it to sail 
alone, is in our belief a mad Ontology, but it is not the 
death of prayer, and supplementary schemes are not 
what we might think them to be to afford hope for the 
answer of our supplications. For, think a moment. 
Suppose a miracle. Or suppose a chance for God to 
come in for extemporized acts. It might seem all sim- 
ple. Elijah prays, and the heavens give rain. Or* I 
pray, and God keeps me from death. It might easily 
seem that Evolution, settled from the egg, would leave 
no room for requests, and that miracle or extemporized 
relief were the only chance for the hopeful offering of 
supplication. 

But look further. 



Chap. XII.] Evolution and Revelation. 389 

Miracle or not, God fixes everything from the be- 
ginning. That is a thing forgotten. Darwin fixes 
everything in an iron frame, but so does Ethics. Mira- 
cle might offer a look of freedom, but there is but one 
system. If it admit miracle, it is broader than if it 
follow law ; but the law of nature, if superseded and 
deposed, yields to a higher law. This universe is the 
holiest possible. To make it so, there must be a frame 
like iron. No two bests can exist. And, therefore, 
miracle or no, there is a path mapped out from the 
first, which has never been transcended. Pray, and 
there will be the same beltistic consequences. Entreat, 
and nothing alters. Tyndall can transfer all his scoff. 
For, if we held to the fixity of nature, it could not be 
more entire than the fixity of grace. God sees a certain 
plan. No other eye sees it. It is nevertheless fixed 
by law. And if miracle came, and God directly inter- 
vened at my request, that would not alter the iron of 
His will. In the ages of the past He fixed that miracle. 
And now we have only to choose between the iron of 
Darwin's scheme, and the iron of a higher one, both 
being equally unchanged, and both being impossible to 
alter by prayer or anything. 

What is the solution, therefore? Why that the 
iron includes the prayer. In the observatory in my vil- 
lage, the seat moves round with the dome. 

Tyndall argues, My daughter's malady is fixed by 
nature. Pray, if you like ; but the result is settled. 
Nature will remain unchanged ; and if matter moves 
finally to a relief, well. Prayer does nothing. Now, 
grant it. Give me Darwin's scheme, and will I sur- 
render prayer ? By no means. There was an original 
act. That act was Providence. Darwin's Providence 
was sealed up in an egg. Beautiful beyond my possi- 



39° Theology. [Book V. 

bility to conceive, that Providence was finished at a 
stroke. God might have vanished, and the universe 
move on. Prayer, therefore, must be built into the sys- 
tem. Darwinism must take in all instruments ; — what 
seed is to crop, what steam is to travel, what heat is 
to life. In view of the provided prayer, God had ar- 
ranged the provided healing. If Darwin says, ' This 
exacts too much ; ' — behold the audacity of his system ! 
There being a world of act, — ploughing and sowing, 
thinking and willing, praying and getting a relief, — Tyn- 
dall stops at prayer, and pronounces his own scheme 
insufficient to admit of this last prevision. 

And so of the answerers of Tyndall. They do harm 
certainly in the way that they reject his system. Law 
is not against prayer. Strict natural sequence does not 
forbid it. We are horrified at the thought that the 
nebular hypothesis should restrict our prayer. When, 
therefore, a preacher admits that where physics is 
fixed prayer has no province, I feel betrayed ; because 
I know that miracle is equally fixed. If God could be 
changing nature, that would be equally settled. There 
is a beltistic universe. It must be built upon a single 
scheme. That scheme must be settled from eternity. 
To alter it must breed a worse. To pray against it 
would be utterly futile. And, therefore, the duty of 
prayer, like the duty of anything beside, is wove into 
the plan, and is of the very highest force ; but can only 
be recompensed as itself a fixity in nature. 

To speak; squarely, therefore, — May a Darwinian 
pray? Undoubtedly. Why may a Darwinian pray? 
Because he is a theist. How is he a theist? Because 
he believes in a creation. How does he believe in a 
creation ? He believes in an act that called a nebula 
into being that is to live by itself and produce all the 



Chap. XII.] Evolution and Revelation. 391 

realities of the universe. Is there a Providence to 
follow it? No. Is there a Providence at all? Yes. 
How is there a Providence at all ? There is a Provi- 
dence in the parent egg, such that it is to produce all 
results, and to act as though Providence did follow, 
and as though God did intervene to produce all that 
seems ex tempore in nature. May I pray, therefore ? 
Certainly I may pray. Why may I pray? Because I 
will not be answered without. Why ? Because my 
prayer and answer were arranged in the creation. It 
is arranging a great deal, I grant ; but there is the 
audacity of the system. As a mere effect, prayer as 
arranged with its reply, and mercy as a gift to faith, are 
not things that should be rejected, if the universe of 
facts were bred in the womb of being. 

For how differs the follower of miracle ? He says, 
I pray, and God works a miracle. Or how the inter- 
ference-theist ? I pray, and God extemporizes a result. 
Be this ever so much the case, it was fixed eternally. 
And this, not by an arbitary plan, but by the very 
nature of Ethics. There is but one holiest possible 
world. To make it, there is but one holiest possible plan. 
What difference if that could be tied up in an egg ? It 
would be but one difference, that of a God providing 
at a stroke, and that of a God following His work with 
no possible license beyond what has been originally 
decreed. 

And take the wiliest reply. Suppose it be said, 
Evolution is physical. If I pray, that cannot alter 
Evolution, and all that can be thought is, that Evolu- 
tion was arranged to meet that prayer from the first 
moment of time. But prayer can lead now to miracle, 
or, take the other theory, prayer can move now upon 
will. If things are not locked up in Darwinism, prayer 



39 2 Theology. [Book V. 

can be operative at once ; and the will of God can be 
actually moved at the time by my petitions. And yet, 
notice how little this relieves. Darwinism has one 
fixity ; Ethics has another. It is true that prayer 
could ask for an immediate intervention of divine 
compassion. If I were the whole of the universe, I 
could conceive of some extempore results. But if the 
whole is beltistic, — and the plan is blent, — a girl speak- 
ing just so at a well (Gen. xxiv. 14, 18, 19), and a man 
hanging just then upon a cross, a sparrow not falling to 
the ground without my Father, then Darwinism is really 
less fixed than the Almighty ; for Darwinism could be 
interrupted by miracle, but the Almighty never. It is 
a fancy, that prayer must have extemporized results ; 
for the sequences of Ethics are just as fixed as the laws 
of matter. 

II. Going over to the other kind of Revelation, I 
find myself infinitely more exposed. 

Theism I can hardly imagine to be overturned ; but 
a Deluge, or a birth from a first pair, or a Tower of 
Babel, or a resurrection of the body, I find much more 
liable to be overturned. I do not pretend that the 
Bible is not a book of Science. I know that it is. 
When it says, " In the beginning God created," it is 
as distinct a scientism as Boscovitch's atoms. It is 
misery to make such a defence. Nor would we hold 
with those who make the Bible to be merely popular. 
We should insist that it is precise. When it declares, 
that God " has made of one blood all nations," I claim 
that. And I make it literal. That is, the story of 
Adam and Eve is with me as special as Darwin's proto- 
plasm. If I were a hot polemic, 1 would prefer that. 
For, believing as I do in a Scriptural triumph, I would 
make it as great as it can be ; and not be found, when 



Chap. XII.] Evolution and Revelation. 393 

Science begins to be confused, with half my battlements 
thrown down, and half my Scriptures gratuitously for- 
saken. 

The Bible is either all or nothing. 

Now that it is all, I satisfy myself in two particulars. 

1. First, the theoretical. 

Do you not notice that Darwin admits the greatest 
miracle ? 

This is our one corrective. 

Jesus rising from the dead is a light achievement 
beside the original nebula. 

This I firmly insist on. 

Evolution may be conceived unending. Grant it. 
And let us have no varyings. Darwin speaks of more 
beginnings. Let us have one. And let us make the 
miracle the extremest possible. Let us suppose one 
mist, never again interfered with, to be the cause of all 
causes, and to be so endowed, from the first moment 
of its time. 

Now I say, The man ready for that, is ready for 
Scripture. The man of protoplasm is the very man for 
Adam and Eve. I grant, the Garden is not the dictate 
of Science : I mean physical science ; neither indeed 
could it be. Darwin himself admits all that. It is 
built on faith. But faith with us is itself a science. 
Give us Ethics, and its mates, and we are fenced with 
a higher science ; and we return to Darwin, and say, 
We have miracle by your own confession ; and now 
we claim all sorts of miracles. We are open to all the 
miracles in the Bible ; only w T e admit that they violate 
nature : and that is precisely what you admit. We 
stand on the very definition of a miracle ; and the 
Garden of Eden, and the Noachic Deluge, and the 
Plain of Shinar, and the Crossing of the Sea, and the 
17* 



394 Theology. [Book V. 

Incarnation of Christ, and the Resurrection of the 
Body, are lesser miracles than your original protoplasm. 

2. But, says Darwin, there are historic difficulties ; 
and here I admit is the critical field. Miracle in genere 
cuts its own way ; but miracle in particular must agree 
with history. Miracle, as such, is like the burglar's 
jimmy : it may break the stoutest locks ; but miracle, 
in particular, may break some little thread which with 
its tell-tale seal makes the burglar turn pale. 

Now this we most plenarily confess. It is a con- 
tempt of this, that has worked such mischief in religion. 

There are foot-prints on the dust of ages, that are 
more formidable facts than the most deep-rooted of 
the laws of nature. And let me say, distinctly ; reli- 
gion is on trial before these. It does harm to deny it. 
It is mean to deny it ; because we have reaped the 
most splendid results by its history. And this I mean 
by historic proof. It has been the noblest of our out- 
ward evidences. And now, when Christianity has fought 
this battle, and for years and years and years gone in 
and come out victorious, I want her to go in again. 
To shirk, and say her books are parables, and wish her 
out of the broil, is all wicked. Science has been her 
finest ally. To be afraid of it, is to deny the Deity. 
And the foot-prints on the past must still come to give 
triumph to her among the concerns of man. 

But now, after this prologue, to come to facts. The 
rocks have a certain chronology. That I confess. The 
world might be created six thousand years ago, and 
Darwin could not challenge it on the score of miracle. 
But then these rocks ! 

Now I admit all this. The world is older than six 
thousand years ; and the argument that God might 
create all as it is, is not a likely one, and all empiricism 



Chap. XII.] Evolution and Revelation. 395 

is by likeness. I admit that worn teeth and dead ages, 
without particularizing the proofs, have been read cor- 
rectly by the geologists of the planet. But so much 
the fairer the Christian venture. It has left all to the 
proofs. It has confessed itself perpetually at stake. 
It has been presented by the grand juries of a thou- 
sand years, — and yet it has not been cast. Speeches 
are now making which seem ominous of results ; and 
yet History, which is the just appeal, has carried her 
as winning in the past, and with a bundle of Reports 
that say for her more than she at first imagined. 

I will never stand against well settled Science. 

But now look at one case. Darwin says, that man 
bears the marks of being developed. He must concede 
to miracle ; but the miraculously created man he ob- 
jects to, as telling another story. The miraculously 
created rock he objects to, and I share in his difficulty. 
The miraculously created man, then, he asks, — Why 
read his record in a different way ? 

Now, let us be careful : for just here we bring in 
w T hat has perhaps never before been considered. 

Suppose we were at Babel. The Bible asserts a 
miracle. Some men give it up as they do Eden. 
Suppose we enforce it. Suppose there were a birth 
of languages. What sort would they be ? Undoubt- 
edly a created sort. Suppose there were a division of 
peoples. How far would that go ? Darwin would leave 
room for any miracle. But suppose he fitted-on his new 
argument. Suppose he talked of the foot-prints of the 
past. Suppose he looked at the Coptic, and said, This 
is a developed tongue. This points backward. Here 
are the very sibilants that must have sprung from a 
savage use. Here is the hum and the hiss and the 
twist and the shatter, and the seeds of speech, that 



396 Theology. [Book. V. 

show that it grew up from brutal utterances. Suppose 
he were to measure, and say, the Coptic was growing a 
million of years: would that be fair treatment? If 
God inspired languages, would they not be likely to be 
developed ? And, intended for development while 
they last, might they not be started with a base of it 
in their first creation ? 

Now, travel with the question into Eden. Suppose 
God created trees on the fifth day, would you expect 
them to be developed trees? Must they be fibreless 
and ringless and bear no look of the past ? Must 
Adam have no umbilicus, and would it be dishonest in 
God to give him any look of the past ? If God divided 
the nations, might He not blacken the Copt? and give 
him the look of a separate species ? Do you know 
much about it ? If you honestly thought that it would 
hardly do that they should look developed, do you cer- 
tainly know ? And if Adam was created at a stroke, 
and with ample arrangements that he might develop a 
race, do you know how much he might look developed, 
and how much analogy with brutes might serve as a 
foundation for his history in the future ? 

Miracle is a great corrective. Where miracle can be 
posited, Science has to stand bowed. Miracle must not 
be wild. It must not hold up a fossil, and say, This 
tooth never chewed. It must not hammer a chalk 
cliff, and say, This cliff sprang at a word. It must re- 
spect its record as of the past. But to say of a single 
loaf, Christ did not create this, and to laugh at the pre- 
tence that He did, because forsooth here are the very 
bubbles of the yeast, is to trifle with the scope of mir- 
acle. What mortal can tell that the negro may not be 
a species from Babel ? that language may not have 
looked derived ? that Adam may not have been created 



Chap. XIII. J Evolution and Ontology. 397 

at a stroke ? and nevertheless be a base for our descent 
best if he appeared developed ? 

CHAPTER XIII. 

EVOLUTION UNDER THE LIGHT OF ONTOLOGY. 

Evolution, escaping almost all cavil while it 
lives under the test of Revelation, comes into hard 
times at once when it comes among other Ontologies. 

Here is its real difficulty. 

How could God create protoplasm? I, for one, 
utterly scout it. I believe in Omnipotence ; but Om- 
nipotence has its limits ; and here is one of them. 
Protoplasm would be God. To create a thing that 
could do all things, so that God might adjourn and go 
out of being, would be to create God ; and this is the 
form in which the wheel turns round. Darwin admits 
creation ; but others do not ; and presently some wiser 
scheme moves round in the ring, and develops proto- 
plasm into the Almighty. 

Hence are to be distinguished other systems. 

2. A second (Darwinism being the first) requires 
concur sus. This scheme can be described by simply 
adding to the former the idea of God's continual sup- 
port. We may maintain protoplasm. All the ideas 
of steady invincible Evolution : the development 
scheme : the survival of the fittest : all the effects in 
" selection " and the improvement of the species, — are 
just the same under this as under the other. In ap- 
pearance the schemes are similar. This only supplies 
the fact that God flows into and upholds. Otherwise 
all is the same. Darwinism, in its detail, is similarly 
possible. And theism can have the same respect ; 
that is, it can claim its miracles. It can open the 



39 8 Theology. [Book V. 

Bible, and claim any event upon the list, and make it 
the interruption of second cause, and the violation of 
physical law, precisely under this scheme as under the 
other. The only gain is, a higher probableness. For, 
protoplasm left to itself, and protoplasm sustained 
forever, will look exactly the same ; the only difference 
being, a lesser miracle. 

3. The poorest hypothesis of all is that which we 
shall mention as the third scheme. It is an itching to 
make prayer reasonable. It, therefore, posits a third 
interference. It not only imagines support ; it not 
only declares for miracle ; but it supposes a third thing, 
viz. an intermeddling of the Almighty by any random 
motive of His will. Its argument is, A physician can 
interfere : is God less free than a physician ? Its rea- 
soning is, A daughter is dying of disease. A physician 
can intervene : cannot the Almighty ? There are 
imagined, therefore, three modes for the result, the 
Almighty's steady law, the Almighty's intervening 
care, and Almighty miracle. The three make up the 
system. Prayer, therefore, is like prayer to a friend. 
He can come in on the spot. Recently, there has 
been a great deal like this. But then how mad ! A 
physician can come in. But why ? Because he is in 
the chain of natural law. He is himself a part of the 
creation. To illustrate the system by a stone ; — that 
it seeks the earth by law, but that a boy can interfere 
by will, is to forget that the boy is under the sweep 
of law. Of two things one. Either there is natural 
law, or there is not. If there is not, cut off the first 
part of the theory. If there is, cut off the third. For 
nature and miracle is all that can be conceived in an 
ontological system. 

There may be covert miracle. A man starves, and 



Chap. XIII.] Evolution and Ontology. 399 

prays for bread, and crosses the hill, and a loaf lies 
upon the highway, and God may have created it. 
We do not know how frequent such things may be. I 
wish to say distinctly that the world may be full of 
them. Bat this only means that I do not understand 
the Almighty's administration. But this I know, God 
cannot be natural and unnatural. He cannot work by 
law and not. He cannot net-work the universe with 
rule, and lay down in the same measures a random 
system. He can break up the law by miracle. But 
this exhausts the possibility. Miracle can be covert, 
of course. But miracle of some sort is all that can 
alternate with a rule of nature. 

4. A fourth system lays down the same chance for 
Evolution, and goes by the same rule of law, and brings 
in the same scope for miracle, but turns its back en- 
tirely upon an original protoplasm. It denies a nebula 
as anything but the power of God. So it follows with 
the universe. It pronounces atoms to be nothing : 
and deals with a dynamistic structure. And when 
simply challenged for its proof, it turns the tables. It 
makes its war simply on the ground of no proof, — that 
is, the law of parcimony. It challenges the five senses. 
It says, They see everything. In the not-self, at least, 
they tell all that is going on. Now it says, Notori- 
ously you are conversant with power. Sense brings 
you that ; and sense, it can be notoriously demon- 
strated, brings you nothing otherwise. Why do you 
assert a brutish atom ? And so a system is built up 
that begins with no protoplasm, and goes on through 
the ages of eternity as a simple potence. 

And yet it has the same appearances. 

It may believe in Evolution, like any other theory. 

It accepts settled laws ; and counts them the effect 



4°0 Theology. [Book V. 

of one efficiency as making room symmetrically for 
the advent of another. 

It pleads cause. Cause, dynamistically considered, 
is not simply the Great Cause, but differently, and in a 
secondary sense, power basing one exertion upon an- 
other. And, therefore, all theories, — of Christianity, 
for example, in everything that it may reveal ; of mira- 
cle, breaking one thread, and substituting another; of 
prophecy, involving a decree ; of Providence, shaping 
everything to a single scheme ; and of Evolution itself 
in all its Darwinian extreme, — are just as possible 
dynamistically as with some other molecule. 

5. Now change this theory a little, and we will 
adopt it personally. It arrogates too much. The 
atomic phantasy arrogates too much in positing the 
atom ; but dynamism goes to the opposite extreme. 

Let it say, We know nothing but power. There 
we will agree with it. Let it say, All positing of sub- 
stance is a thing of fraud. That we hold. Let it ex- 
plain, We mean substance in its more brutish sense. 
And then, settling its robes in this discreet attitude, 
which is simply of negation, let it say, NEVERTHELESS 
THERE MUST BE MORE THAN POWER ; and we are 
with it at a bound. 

Our objection to the brute atom is, that it pretends 
something ; that it posits something visible ; that it 
gives it an intelligent name, and works upon it as 
though it were a thing discerned. Whereas our last 
land in the voyage was, our idea of power. That is a 
shadowy mist ; and to see anything further is a sheer 
deceiving. I only say, that, by a train of analogy, I 
am not at the end of my line. Analogy shakes her 
wand, and says, There is more yonder. She frowns if I 
say, I see it. She laughs, if I impute "it to Intuitive 



Chap. XIII.] Evolution and Ontology. 401 

Belief. And she explains all, if I go back over the 
line of what is like, and see how she has pushed me 
along, and how, at the end of the light, she points out 
into the dark, and asserts the INVISIBLE. 

We are dynamists, therefore, in a mere negative 
Sense; appealing to parcimony ; ridiculing the man 
who posits atoms ; believing that efficiency is dark 
enough, but that a briitum tertium is utterly unknown ; 
referring everything to the power of God ; believing 
Evolution to exist, except upset by miracle ; uphold- 
ing prayer as involved in the original decree ; believing 
that it is necessary, even though all travel on un- 
changed ; believing that all does travel on unchanged, 
but only because the supplication was supplied ; be- 
lieving that we are answered in one case in ten mil- 
lion by miracle ; and believing that we are answered 
then in a way differing nothing in its liberty, because 
the miracle itself is imbedded in a scheme that is un- 
changed. 

See, therefore, how Ontological schemes lie in sha- 
dow, and how Ontological difficulties chiefly occur from 
Ontological cause. Ethical schemes can look blandly 
upon all of them ; nay, Ethical law supplies their best 
light. A cause for all creation is best found in Ethics. 
And while Theology without Ethics would be a gloomy 
mass, with Ethics it escapes out of the Unknowable of 
Spencer, and posits a personal Jehovah. The universe 
becomes the best- possible. A motive for it emerges 
at a stroke. The law of it supervenes perfectly. It 
assumes to itself but a single thread. And while un- 
ethically it would be a chaos of chance, Metaphysics, 
which is thought so dim, proves clearer than Physics, 
and is the part of Ontological schemes that survives the 
shock, when sense-calculations meet with overthrow. 



402 Theology. [Book V. 

Blessed be the influence, therefore, that stole con- 
science out of the vocabulary. Conscience meant con- 
sciousness. All through the Latin years, and early in 
our English history, conscience had no other meaning. 
It kept on that way all through the time of King James 
(see Ec. x. 20 marg. Heb. x. 2). But virtue was so 
much its most precious consciousness, that virtue stole 
all the name. And it is a fine lesson for our age, that, 
as men refined, they saw little wealth in consciousness 
but virtue, and ejected out of the original word all 
other forms of introspective vision. 



THE END. 



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For Opinions expressed by Prominent Professors 
see following pages- 



LETTERS INTRODUCTORY 

TO A 

SECOND EDITION. 



I. 

New York, Feb. 15, 1875. 
Rev. and Dear Sir, 

In preparing a new edition of ' ' Fetich in Theology, " a 
book that has provoked much comment both adverse 
and favorable, we are desirous of having the opinion, as 
to its essential views, of Professors in Theology of the 
same school of belief as that to which the author belongs. 
We desire to publish such opinions as an Introduction to 
the work itself. It is, perhaps, not aside from the an- 
cient duty of the Professor to be a referee in matters of 
belief; and as you hold the Divinity chair in the most 
largely attended Seminary of your branch of the Presby- 
terian communion, we will be especially obliged if you 
will unite with others, also Calvinists, in sending us a 
proper judgment upon the points which this work in- 
volves. Yours very truly, 

Dodd & Mead. 

To the Rev. R. L. Dabney, D.D. 



ii Letters Introductory 

Union Theo. Seminary,* Va., 
Feb. 25, 1875. 

To Messrs. Dodd & Mead, 

Publishers, etc., New York. 
Dear Sirs, — You ask my candid opinion of the work 
of the Rev. John Miller, "Fetich in Theology, or, Doc- 
trinalism Twin to Ritualism, " published by you. If you 
are willing to accept an answer prompted by perfect sin- 
cerity and independence, I will reply that I had read this 
criticism on Dr. Chas. Hodge's Systematic Theology 
before you called my attention to it, with great interest 
and profit. Mr. Miller has, in my opinion, shown in it 
high ability, full scholarship, and fine acumen. His 
friends have, I think, cause to regret its title, on the 
ground that the supporters of Dr. Hodge will regard it 
as too biting, and even disrespectful to him ; although 
all who know Mr. Miller are aware that he is incapable 
of either bitterness or discourtesy. His style is in several 
places so highly tropical, and in others so compressed, that 
I fear those passages will prove, to many hasty or imper- 
fectly taught readers, not wholly intelligible. The pro- 
fessional student finds an astonishing amount of acute, 
just, and profound matter condensed in these brief chap- 
ters. There are also points of exception taken which ex- 
planations on the part of Dr. Hodge's advocates will proba- 
bly remove. Yet others of Mr. Miller's exceptions I regard 
as well taken ; and his criticism is timely and valuable. 
The Gospel system set forth in the Scriptures is obnoxious 
to the deepest prejudices of the natural heart. It has 
always been the object of violent or subtile perversions. 

* Southern Presbyterian Church. 



to a Second Edition. iii 

Hence, it is a subject of profound regret, when one whom 
so many regard as an authorized and able expounder as 
Dr. Hodge, so misrepresents the belief of the friends of 
the Gospel, as to exasperate unnecessarily any of the 
angles of God's truth, to provoke needless opposition, or 
to obscure the glory of its divine Author in any degree. 
When such mistakes are made by a hand so influential, 
protest is usually found as difficult as it is necessary. 
Hence, I highly honor the moral courage of Mr. Miller 
in this criticism. He could not but foresee, knowing the 
degree in which the writer criticised is "the fashion" 
among Presbyterians, and being aware of the spirit of 
subserviency, the moral cowardice, and the impatience of 
independent thought which characterize his day, that the 
professed friends of the truth, whose battle he is really 
fighting, would leave him to wage it single-handed, or 
even oppose him. So it was plain that he would receive 
public applause from those dissenters from the truth 
whom both he and Dr. Hodge have been all their lives 
opposing : as the event has verified. This applause is to 
Mr. Miller an inconvenience ; because it affects to claim 
him as making common cause for error. It is true that 
the approbation coming from the advocates of the so- 
called "Liberal" theology, is a preposterous blunder; 
that Mr. Miller has nothing in common with these men — 
not even opposition to Dr. Hodge ; for while they would 
injure him because they regard him as a formidable enemy 
to their erroneous system, Mr. Miller only seeks to cor- 
rect him, in order to make him a more formidable enemy 
to it ; that the system which Mr. Miller upholds is in 
more utter — because more intelligent, consistent, and 
scriptural — opposition to theirs. But none the less is this 
applause an inconvenience to the friends of the truth. 



iv Letters Introductory 

In the Southern Presbyterian Review, of April, 1873, I 
published a review of some parts of Dr. Hodge's work. 
I may indicate my own estimate of it by some quotations 
from this review (see pp. 168, 170). 

" Among the other characteristics of this treatise, which 
present themselves to a cursive examination, may be 
noted the following : 

1. "Dr. Hodge asserts that our knowledge of God is 
' intuitive, ' and then argues for the proposition that there 
is a God ! This argument, ignoring the usual theistic 
method in a manner rather marked, relies chiefly upon 
the ethical phenomena of the soul. " 

2. "Those who have had the privilege of Dr. Hodge's 
conversation, are aware that the denunciation of the 
claims of philosophy to be a true science has been rather a 
favorite topic with him ; and this opinion is not obscurely 
indicated in his Theology. Yet we know of no standard 
Reformed treatise which makes so much use of philo- 
sophy, or contains so large a proportion of philosophical 
speculation." 

3. "The author, under many heads of divinity, dis- 
plays the multifarious forms of error with more fullness 
than his own views of what is true." 

4. *"If we might judge by the author's citations in 
what direction his theological reading chiefly lay, we 
should conclude that German heresy, in its different 
forms, had received more of his attention than any other 
department, orthodox or heterodox. Next would come 
the works of the Continental Protestants — Lutheran and 
Reformed. The teachers and leaders of Scotch and Scotch 
Irish Presbyterianism are very scantily noticed ; and, so 
far as we now remember, there is not a single reference to 
the theology of the Anglican Church, or its great masters, 



to a Second Edition. v 

to intimate that the author had ever heard of them. So, 
American theology appears chiefly in the names of its 
heresiarchs, and for purposes of refutation." 

" This extract gives us also a very characteristic 

specimen of Dr. Hodge's method as a debater. Under 
an appearance of simple, Saxon straightforwardness, he 
most adroitly modifies, and by modifying, disparages, the 
view he intends to assault : and he gains credit for his 
own, ' by associating it with unquestioned truth, and 
claiming for it, with a quiet dogmatism, the universal 
adhesion of the orthodox learned. " 

You will see from the above, that while Dr. Hodge's 
great learning and force are admitted, no very great value 
is placed by me upon his huge work. I should, like 
Mr. Miller, protest against the adoption of it as the rep- 
resentative, for* our day, of the Westminster theology. 
The unfitness of the work for this purpose arises from the 
dogmatism of Dr. Hodge's temper, often deceiving him- 
self, and often his readers. With an appearance of sim- 
ple directness, and clear logical method, he is often inac- 
curate and confused ; while the illations, seemingly so 
close, are in fact disjointed. My chief objection to being 
held responsible for this work as a showing for our Pres- 
byterian theology, is that species of one-sided hardness 
which Dr. Hodge's logical ultraism gives it. Many of 
Mr. Miller's points are, I think, well taken against this 
tendency. In reply to most of them, it is true, Dr. 
Hodge's friends will probably be able to point to state- 
ments in other parts of the work, correcting or softening 
these erroneous colorings. We are glad to allow all the 
weight to these modifying statements to which they are 
entitled, and to acquit the work of all fatal intentional 
error. But the general impression remains, that this 



vi Letters Introductory 

presentation of doctrine gives us, not the God of the Law 
and Gospel to worship, the Being of consummate moral 
beauty, glory, and goodness ; but a God of hard force 
and bare sovereignty. * For instance : 

Dr. Hodge begins by saying, that our belief in God is 
" innate:" and then explains it by saying, it is "intui- 

* This practical estimate is singularly — because very artlessly 
and independently — confirmed by a letter, which something akin 
to chance has thrown within reach, just as these replies are coming 
in for publication. It is from a niece of the most eminent Divin- 
ity professor that Virginia ever gave to the Northern Church. It 
is to another lady, and without the most remote idea of any other 
perusal: — "I have read 'Fetich' — would you believe it? — not 
only with pleasure but with eagerness ! (I have not finished it 
either, but that is because I am so busy.) I thought it would be 
rather heavy reading for one of my reach, and so left it long un- 
touched on my book-case ; but when I fairly waded in, I sat up 
late as one does over a novel. Perhaps it would not be such fas- 
cinating reading, except for the novelty and beauty and often 
queerness of the language, that tolls you along through whatever is 
too abstruse — for I don't love abstruseness. When I opened the 
book I said to myself, It don't matter one bit what Dr. Hodge and 
Mr. Miller write and wrangle about the nature of God ; it only 
matters to love Him with all the heart, and mind, and soul, and 
strength ; but I find it does matter indeed, for I shall have to 
thank ' Fetich ' all my life, for making it possible for me to love 
a good, holy, beautiful God, without that hazy discomfort which 
has from my very childhood hindered my worship. I don't know 
where I got that unworthy idea of God ; but after reading the first 
part of this book, and re and rereading it, I found my eyes wet 
with tears of glad emotion. Lo ! this was my God, whom I had 
known through such a hindering, distorting haze, and now saw 
for the first time in such loveliness and beauty that I needed no 
spur to worship Him. I do thank Mr. Miller from my heart, and 
only wonder that everybody had not told me before what he has 
done for Presbyterianism. I shall attack Mamma in my next 
letter that she did not urge me to read it sooner." 



to a Second Edition. vu 

tive." Now, in the sense of the philosopher : it would 
not be innate if it were intuitive ; for our real intuitions 
are not innate ; but only the principles or laws of reason 
which give them to us afterwards are innate. And, sec- 
ond : our belief in God is not intuitive ; it is a near, a 
clear, a just conclusion from all our rational and moral in- 
tuitions. It is thus a truth which every right mind infal- 
libly gets, upon coming to think. 

In stating the great and priceless argument from our 
intuitions of conscience, Dr. Hodge seems to teach that 
our judgment of moral obligation only recognizes God 
as supreme. But does might make right, in God's case, 
any more than in a man's ? My reason tells me, that I 
am immediately and infinitely bound to obey God, be- 
cause His is a holy supremacy : because the will which 
controls me is infinitely excellent. 

Is an act right solely because God requires it : or has 
He required it because it is right ? The Bible teaches me 
the latter, with the Westminster Assembly, and the great 
Reformed divines, like Turrettin. Dr. Hodge seems to 
obscure this blessed truth, and to argue as though there 
were a hankering for the opposite answer, which resolves 
obligation into God's power, instead of His righteous- 
ness. 

We go with Dr. Hodge in condemning Optimism, 
where it says that the greatest beneficence to creatures is 
God's ultimate end. But he seems to demand of us that 
we shall say with him, that God's own glory is His ulti- 
mate end, in a sense so hard as to resolve God's whole 
providence into a scheme of infinite selfishness. When 
we say : God's own infinite perfections of wisdom, love, 
and holiness will surely prompt in Him a providence which 
will prove beltistic in this sense : that it will, on the 



viii Letters Introductory 

whole, doubtless secure in the most perfect way that 
whole set of ends which God sees to be (We blind crea- 
tures can see but in part what they should be), as a whole, 
most consistent with His holiness : it would seem that 
this scarcely contents Dr. Hodge. 

When we come to the awful mystery of God's dealings 
with our race in its first father, Adam, Dr. Hodge is 
scarcely content to claim for God (what every reverent 
mind gladly concedes) a width of discretion in applying 
the immutable principles of justice agreeably to His tran- 
scendent wisdom, holiness, goodness, and sovereign pro- 
prietorship in us, as far above any application we creatures 
are entitled to make of the same principles, as the heav- 
ens above the earth. But he appears to crave to drive us 
to the wall until we acknowledge that, because God is 
supreme, He'deals judicially with his creatures, upon no 
principles of distributive justice at all ! And should even 
the reverent mind reply: "I see not how I could believe 
that of this lovely, holy God, were I to try : " Dr. Hodge 
would rejoin : God does that way : and so, you shall be- 
lieve it or be damned, whether you can or not. There 
is, it appears to us, a sort of perverse and perilous zeal to 
exasperate the difficulties of a difficult problem of divine 
providence, into the hardest shape. 

When we come to God's punitive justice — where other 
Calvinists say, that God's holiness prompts Him to punish 
— Dr. Hodge prefers the statement which represents God 
as punishing for the sake of punishing, in the same imme- 
diate sense in which He blesses for the sake of blessing. 
Here again, these solemn dispensations of severity, where 
purity, truth, and justice combine with goodness, to visit 
the deserved penalty on the guilty, in Dr. Hodge's hands 
freeze into the harshness of a power simply vindicatory. 



to a Second Edition. ix 

When we meet the objection : "If the sinner is unable 
to repent, to love, to believe, how can it be just to re- 
quire these of him ? " the great Reformed divines taught 
us, with the Saviour, to answer : It is just, because his 
ungodly disposition is his inability. But Dr. Hodge re- 
quires us to say ; No : his inability is something more 
than that. But if this inability is rooted somewhere else 
than in the spontaneity, and requires for its removal 
something else than renewal of heart, can we punish the 
sinner for his helplessness, without harshness ? Dr. 
Hodge seems to insist on that harshness. 

When we inquire into the tie between saving faith and 
repentance, the Scriptures answer that they are twin 
graces, both the offspring of regeneration, entering the 
soul to bless it simultaneously, and co-operating instru- 
mentally, the one to purge, and the other to justify. We 
had believed that both graces touched the head and the 
heart: so that while repentance was inspired by a knowl- 
edge of God in Christ, faith led the man to believe 
with the heart unto salvation. This Gospel-philo- 
sophy Dr. Hodge reverses, making an intellectual faith 
somehow result in a heart-repentance as its consequent. 
Thus again, the very bond which instrumentally unites 
the sinner to his Saviour, is hardened into a logical 
process. 

It is not surprising that Dr. Hodge, after outraging the 
necessary intuitions of the soul, should suppose himself 
constrained to depict that rationalism which is the an- 
tithesis of humble faith, as an over use of the reason. 
The Westminster theology had taught us to regard it as 
the abuse of the reason. Is it not unfortunate, that Dr. 
Hodge should seem to give the intelligent adversary of 
the Gospel this pretext for saying : ' ' The price, at which 



x Letters Introductory 

I am invited to adopt the Bible theology, is the abnega- 
tion of my essential manhood " ? 

In the former half of my Review, to which I have re- 
ferred, I have already made the attempt to subject Dr. 
Hodge's theory as to the nature of inability, regeneration, 
repentance, and faith, to a radical examination. I think 
I have there shown, that his peculiar teachings on those 
points are not those of the Bible, nor of the great Re- 
formed divines, nor of sound philosophy ; and that, 
with all their hardness of aspect, they are yet, in fact, 
short of the real truth touching the sinner's ruin and re- 
covery. 

Very respectfully, etc., 

Robert L. Dabney. 



II. 

Reply (to a like communication) of Rev. Joseph T. 
Cooper, D.D., Professor of Systematic Theology in 
the Seminary of the United Presbyterian Church. 

Alleghany, March 23, 1875. 
Messrs. Dodd & Mead. 

Dear Sirs, — I read some time ago ^Fetich in Theology, " 
in relation to the merits of which you ask an expression 
of my judgment. The style is very peculiar, and, in 
some of the sentences, there is a lack of perspicuity. 
It is, however, vigorous, terse, and well freighted with 
thought. With some of the positions of the author I cor- 
dially concur. 

It would be an act of injustice to Dr. Hodge, whom I 
have been accustomed to venerate as an able defender of 



to a Second Edition. xi 

the faith, to give an opinion, in relation to the question 
whether he has been fairly represented by Mr. Miller. 
Before doing this I should feel bound to give the matter 
a more thorough examination than my engagements at 
present will permit. 

I, however, cordially approve of the republication of 
the work ; for it will lead to a more thorough exami- 
nation of the Calvinistic system to which Mr. Miller pro- 
fesses an adherence. His object evidently is to present 
some of its features in an aspect less stern, and more in 
accord with our moral intuitions. If this can be done 
without compromising the truth, all its friends, and, I am 
well persuaded, none more so than Dr. Hodge, will 
greatly rejoice. At all events, the discussions contained 
in this book cannot fail to quicken the intellect, and, it 
is hoped, lead to a more discriminating view of the ab- 
struse but important topics on which it treats. 

Should a different title for the work be selected it would 
be more agreeable to my taste. 

Yours respectfully, 

J. T. Cooper. 



III. 

Reply of Rev. A. B. Van Zandt, D. D. , Professor of 
Systematic Theology in the Seminary of the (Dutch) 
Reformed Church. 

New Brunswick, N. J. April 2, 1875. 

Messrs. Dodd & Mead. 

Gents, — In reply to your note requesting an expres- 
sion of opinion in regard to the essential views set forth 
in ' ' Fetich in Theology " I can give you only my general 



xii Letters Introductory 

impressions. And I give you these as bearing upon the 
purpose which you have intimated of issuing a new 
edition of the work. 

The significance of this book is almost certain to be 
misunderstood. It is the author's misfortune, that his 
work is more likely to receive the applause of those with 
whose views he has no affinities, than of those with whom 
he is substantially in accord. The so-called "Liberal 
School " will probably claim a larger interest in it than 
can possibly be made good from its pages. Whilst, on 
the other hand, the Orthodox may feel scandalized by 
this very claim, and utterly misjudge its spirit and in- 
tent. 

Moreover, the fact that the discussions of the author 
turn chiefly upon the positions taken, or supposed to be 
taken, by Dr. Hodge, may even cause the book to be re- 
garded as an unfriendly attack upon that distinguished 
and venerated man, or upon that system of theology of 
which he is so prominent a representative. 

But these are accidents, which do not affect the im- 
portance of the questions discussed, and ought not to 
prejudice the author's discussion of them. The book, 
whatever may be its faults, is evidently the product of an 
earnest, independent mind. It is the outcome of bold 
and vigorous thought, which has been occupied long with 
the questions upon which it treats. Its logic is some- 
times compressed to the verge of obscurity, and there are 
some expressions which startle us, as being on the verge 
of irreverence. But a careful reader will be convinced 
that its reasonings are too cogent to be easily brushed 
aside, and that its aim and intent is the conservation of 
truth, in order to holiness. 

Without indicating any points of agreement or differ- 



to a Second Edition. xiii 

ence with the author, I have no hesitation in saying that, 
as a contribution to the theological literature of the day, 
his book deserves the thoughtful perusal of all who care 
to examine the great questions upon which it treats, and 
the bearing of the different modes of their treatment 
upon the great controversies of the age. 

There is undoubtedly "a way of putting" the old the- 
ology, which puts it at a great disadvantage. The fear 
of toning it down below the requirements of truth, may 
easily lead to the mistake of formulating it into an aspect 
of unnecessary harshness. How far Mr. Miller has con- 
victed the distinguished theologian whom he criticises, 
of this mistake, or has himself shown a more excellent 
way, is a question which I have not assumed to discuss. 
But it is a question which may properly awaken a very 
deep interest in the book which you propose to reissue. 

Respectfully yours, 

A. B. Van Zandt. 



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